As to caricature being portrayal, Pres. Obama as a monkey is a caricature but not a portrayal. The whole sorry tradition of racist caricature disagrees with you. In the US there is a well known satirical cartoonist, Garry Trudeau who caricaturizes public figures with icons, which are not portrayals of any sort. Caricatures which are so different from the reality they are unrecognizable are still caricatures, even if they have to be labeled to be recognized. A portrayal so unlike the original it has to be labeled is a portrayal?

The counterfactual Combat Fiction exercise was quite thought provoking, at least for me, though it’s hard to be certain from the other responses. Thank you for the time, and for mentioning Breton, Crevel, Lorca and Bunuel.

Heh, and I’d say the exact opposite — that the whole point of caricature is to make a portrait. It’s a portrait which exaggerates the subject’s most distinctive features for comedic/critical effect, but the very point is to portray them. Caricature is just a technique to be applied in portraiture — and as Goya does in painting, so Dickens does in his novels. In writing, in fact, I’d say satire’s not just comparable to caricature, but in part constructed from it, with a caricature like Mister Bumble serving as an exaggeration of society’s most distinctive features for comedic/critical effect. It’s not a photorealist approach to portraiture but given the mass of portraiture in the history of painting that’s been commissioned by the subject and idealised, I don’t think one can really say a portrait must be 100% accurate to qualify as a portrait. Rather you have portraits of various types — recogniseable but idealised representations, warts-and-all accurate representations, and deliberately exaggerated representations.

If THE SATYRICON counts as a kind of novel — and I’m happy to count it and THE GOLDEN ASS as Classical analogues — this rather speaks to my point about what features mark out a text as novelistic. THE SATYRICON is a Menippean Satire. Apuleus’s work, a similarly rambling Milesian Tale, is also considered satire. When we look at works of the Classical period, these are what we class as novels.

I daresay that on some level people who don’t distinguish fiction using the fantastic either have well-tame psychologies that can accept premises in contradiction to reality and self contradictions without hesitation, or at some level feel anything is possible and that the world, at some level anyhow, really is absurd. In either case, the reading experience in fictions using the fantastic (SF, fantasy or absurdist/modernist/post-modernist,) is different. So for me, distinguishing SF as fiction and drama containing the fantastic that tries to help willing suspension of disbelief by rationalizations (original or borrowed from previous works,) serves a useful purpose.

Therefore, my churlishness in feeling a different experience when reading the kind that makes an effort to help me with suspension of disbelief will persist, I fear. And traditionalist and absurdist fantasy will still be like musicals: If you have trouble with the whole convention of people singing elaborate songs ex tempore, accompanied by invisible orchestras, you’ll tend to not like them, even if the ones will fantastic songs or unusually strong stories might be entertaining.

As for the uselessness of examples, it is the examples of works in the SF mode that keep breaking the genre boundaries that cause discussion of SF as genre to collapse. Then, people talk about hybrids between SF and another genre. But when all SF is a hybrid, then there is no core SF. To phrase it another way, if SF were a real genre, there would be examples of the subgenres unique to SF. But it appears many people refuse to admit the validity of generalization. Thus the point is lost.

I separated satires from war novels, explained that in satires the story (implicitly, war story,) then discovered we were discussing the novel as a genre. Well, the novel is not a genre, it is a form. You might as well say prose is a genre. But this is sort of quibbling, because what you’re talking about is the bourgeois novel (except that you reject that kind of political analysis.)

The bourgeois novel is different from other kinds of novels like The Satyricon or The Tale of Genji or The Water Margin novel (All Men Are Brothers in the Buck translation,) or picaresques like Lazarillo de Tormes or romances like Amadis de Gaul or Eschenbach’s Grail romances or Rabelais’ comic/satiric tales by a focus on the individual, rooted in the kind of society where the individual as producer, consumer, trader, family member in a society where market relations are the social bonds. Insofar as the privileged stature of Realism in academia has a reasonable origin, it lies in the desire of the non-noble population to see themselve and their world in their fiction and drama.

The origins of the bourgeois novel in Richardson, Fielding, Scott do not seem to me to be markedly influenced by “satire.” Fielding is the closest to being a satirist, but his genuinely satirical work, Shamela, is forgotten, as much as anything literary is forgotten. Voltaire’s Candide is well remembered and much loved, but is it influential in the development of the bourgois novel?

There is a humorous, ironic tone which might be called satiric. But this isn’t a genre. There is a genre of satire in which the whole story is a means to an end, instead of the end in itself. This is why satire can so easily incorporate the fantastic, in premise, plot and characterization. Satire depends for its effects on the reader taking a critical or ironic attitude to characters, events and settings. But when you start messing with characters, events (aka plot, if any,) and settings, what’s left of story?

Satire’s relation to such things as “story” is like that of caricature to portraiture. Saying the point of caricature is not to make a portrait is such a truism as to be hardly worth saying. To say that the point of caricature is in fact sometimes to make a portrait seems wrong-headed.

I must confess that I had thought the Surrealists had abandoned party affiliation rather than change anything about their work. But thanks to you I will if possible learn for myself. Thank you.

This is where I posit the construction of a personal sense of what works as SF as dependent not just on the type of quirk (i.e. only the “novum” and not the “chimera” — which is, I agree, too restrictive for most SFs,) but on credibility threshold and argued/evasive/contextual dewarping — which is precisely about those bones being thrown to the reader so as to not collapse suspension-of-disbelief. But my point is not, of course, that you should use my praxis, just that it’s an attempt to accommodate the different boundaries set by different readers, where some apply restrictions and where others don’t, what types of bones work to maintain suspension-of-disbelief for this reader but not for that one. It’s very much posited on the notion that real readers cannot always willingly suspend disbelief.

My skepticism as regards example-based discussion is born of the fact that a mass of such examples sit beyond one reader’s boundaries but within those of another. And because defining SF as a genre largely consists of asserting the legitimacy of one set of boundaries over another, the examples simply become the focus of definition disputes between this reader and that. Or worse, the features of the texts on which those boundaries are predicated are misrepresented in order to assert a genre definition but include a particular work which sits outside it. On a cultural level, the turf wars seem pointlessly divisive; I don’t think they do much good. But on a critical level, the misrepresentation of features is where I really kick against the genre definitions; that’s where the discourse becomes garbled with self-contradictions. Still, this is to say that I’m actually situating the problem, to a large extent, in that same insistence on defining SF as a genre.

With satires and novels, yes, I think we’re not going to agree here. But in terms of plot/story, I have to say I reckon you’re getting it exactly wrong. Sorry, I’d agree to disagree, but I think it’s warping actual history to set satire as distinct from novel on the basis of story qualities.

I mean, the historical development of “novelles,” “novellas” or “novels” in the 17th century was very much in a process of contrast with “romances,” with the joys of Story (as Clute would call it) backgrounded to morally illustrative incidents, social critique with a tendency to incorporate gossip and scandal-mongering. In their commonly censorious/salacious intent and presentation as “true histories” these works functioned like PRIMARY COLORS in the present day. As faux “true histories” they naturally took a narrative grammar closer to real life, plotted but not in the easily glossed structures of heroic adventure; that’s precisely what set them out as novels in distinction to “romances.” The lack of story you’re pointing to in my examples, the non-heroic episodic approach, is what makes these works benchmarks in the development of the novel. That sprawl and application of observation/commentary — everything that is lost if you reduce GULLIVER’S TRAVELS to story — is what makes these satires “novelistic,” what makes them the acknowledged ancestors of the present-day novel. The formative and continued role of satire in the idiom of the novel is as transparent as the relationship between blues and rock.

In terms of the modernists, Surrealists like Breton and Crevel were Party members. Lorca never joined, as I understand, but his work was heavily informed by socialist thought (c.f. his touring puppet show.) Bunuel was communist too. Generally Marxism played a big role in that whole movement; I think it’s less influential in modernist literature than it is in painting though. And I’m not aware of a big influence among anglophone writers, who tended more to elitism if not outright fascism — supported or flirted with. (c.f. also the support for fascism on the part of the Italian Futurists.)

You’re approaching all this as a practitioner and theorist of your praxis. By that standard the notion of SF as a mode of fiction that contains a fantastic element that is still somehow possibly real (in the near or far future, after radical new discoveries, inventions and theories, whatever,) can still be too restrictive. The finest precision in terminology is coupled with a determination to carry implications of concepts to new frontiers.

But my interest as a reader is best served by addressing the issue of willing suspension of disbelief. This is partly an emotional reaction, not purely cognitive. But in practice it quite helps if the SF writer will throw me a bone, some sort of rationalization or extrapolation that has some remote connection to reality. Or at least not kickstart my disbelief with flagrant ignorance or nonsense. Hawthorne’s Gentle Reader always can willingly suspend disbelief, amongst his other wonderful traits, but it isn’t so with us real readers. I define SF the way I do as a way to clarify my thinking about this question, which isn’t yours.

I don’t think the empirical disagreements are going to be reconciled. I think in practice critical analysis of SF do not collapse in mutual unintelligibility, because people actually start pointing at examples. I think the discussions in the end fail because people insist on defining SF as a genre, when it’s not. The counterfactual essay postulates comfi. But while I can proffer my (admittedly broad) definition of the SF mode, I can’t come up with a definition of Combat Fiction as a mode, which is how the parallel intended between the counterfactual CF and real SF isn’t.

My empirical judgment is that the elite prejudice against anything other than the ideas of the ruling class, including disdain for the unwashed masses, is the cause of the literary/genre divide, not wrong ideas that can be corrected by rectification of terms. Theoretical work is not neeeded because it won’t solve the problem.

Last, and least, considering that Gulliver’s Travels as a story means most of all the book is rejected, leaving a kid’s story about Gulliver in Lilliput, or that Fielding’s real satire Shamela is quite forgotten as a story or that most people don’t even know (I think) what Cervantes was supposedly satirizing or that Tristram Shandy is remembered for its plot, aka story, I think my view that in satire the story is not the real point holds up. Plainly you disagree, and I can’t see us ever seeing the other’s point at all.

But please do answer this: What modernists bought into the communist metanarrative and ideology?

That’s certainly what postmodernism is about. But it’s the Grand Narratives / metanarratives of modernism that pomo is reacting against, in part because post-WW2 those were associated with fascist and communist ideologies — with good reason, some of the most notable modernists being seduced by those specific Grand Narratives. Though there are flavours of modernism that take a more existentialist approach, where narrative is seen as a way of making sense of a world within which sense must be made by active human agency. Which is to say the world is intelligible, but only procedurally, by experience, by experiment, rather than by projecting into it some essentialist system. I’d argue that some of these strains of existentialist modernism persisted, actually, (much of it in pulp, alongside more technocratic modernism,) even as pomo establlished its own Grand Narrative of the End of History and the world as merely a playground of symbols. (And I think I’ve made my view of that chickenshit retreat into the ivory towers amply clear.) But again, that’s another column.

As for comfort stories versus shock stories… actually what I’m broaching in talking of strangeness and narrative modalities is shock as cognitive dissonance that includes, yes, the shock of the new but also the shock of the foreign, of the anomalous, of the other. (c.f. the “shock of the foreign” in the traveller’s tale.) And there’s a risk of overstating, I’d say, if we posit “shock” as the alternative to comfort, with its implication of blunt and brutal trauma-inducing radicalism, of a relatively crude effect. The shock of the new is often a more subtle estrangement. What we’re really dealing with, it seems to me, is “warp” rather than “shock”. Again, I see (strange) narrative as constructed from various different flavours of warp, locatable in the text. Comfort stories can actually be described in terms of specific strategies, specific modalities. I think a lot of comfort stories actually create warp — or shock, whatever — but only in order to declaw it (and cheaply, panderingly.) But I can’t really discuss this without going into technical jargon like “boulomaic modalities.”

I’m not sure what you mean by the “shock of recognition” in this context, to be honest, but the way I’d use that term wouldn’t be incompatible to the “shock of the new” (or any type of warp as I posit it,) but would actually go hand-in-hand with it, as a purposeful double-whammy whereby, as we adjust to the strange, suddenly we see our own world in it — the familiar in the foreign. I’d tend to expect “comfort stories” to be absent this… though that’s not to say that anything absent this will be a “comfort story.” It’s actually a better criteria, I’d say, than “feel good” or “feel bad”.

My wish is that people would move on past the observation that something is in the SF mode and focus on the type of story, mystery, romance, adventure, whatever, which is where the useful discussion takes place.

I’m right with you here. While mode factors into this, I’d say that there’s more useful discussion to be found by focusing on the narrative grammar — Epic / Heroic / Adventure / Mystery / Thriller / Horror. And indeed there are aesthetics of worldscape (partly conjured in prose style) — neo-primitive, idyllic, baroque, noir, grotesque — that intersect with these. Often, I’d say, arguments over whether or not something is SF come down to what grammar and aesthetic it employs and whether or not that is allowable in this or that person’s definition of SF. I’m happy to leave that boundary dispute to those who care, and talk about a work in terms of grammar and aesthetic. Or at an even lower level indeed…

Saying something is SF is like observing something is historical fiction. You need to see whether the history (or science) is screwed up, and if so, whether it is screwed up to useful purpose or not.

See, this is where I’d agree with you 100% if you replaced “SF” with “futurological fiction.” Because then I think those are the first two questions to be asked: is the history/science screwed up? if so, is it screwed up to useful purpose or not? Actually, you could start with a baseline where the facts of history/science as known now are not screwed up at all — including by extrapolation — so that you have historical fiction and futurological fiction absent the modality-shifting “erratum” and “novum.” (The latter is Suvin’s term, the former mine, and both can, I’ve argued elsewhere, be located in the text, as objectively identifiable features. See my blog entry on narrative modalities: http://notesfromthegeekshow.blogspot.com/2009/06/notes-toward-theory-of-narrative.html )

Then you have works which utilise the erratum or novum, but where it’s entirely possible to say that the facts of history/science are not screwed up at all except by extrapolation; this gives you alternate history and what, I think, you’d classify as science fiction. To the extent that extrapolation is nevertheless screwing up those facts, well then, an important consideration is the protocols applied to limit that process. There’s that rigorous approach which allows for screwing up the facts but not for screwing up the principles, premises, methods of extrapolation from premises and suchlike — where the “proper” alternative history is allowed one point of divergence only and the reconfiguration of the worldscape is arguable if not directly argued, or where the “proper” science fiction novel is allowed to diverge in terms of technology but not theory, and where again the reconfiguration of the worldscape is arguable if not directly argued.

Then you have works which allow for quite substantial screwing up of the facts but employ the One Impossible Idea and/or Paradigm Shift Caveats and/or what I’d call “contextual dewarping” to render the wildest fancy as a novum. The looser protocols here are utterly rejected by some, who don’t give a shit about their purpose. Those who accept these looser protocols may do so on the basis of purpose though — particular ends justifying various means. But they, in turn, will reject work of still looser protocols and different purposes as “not proper SF.” From previous discussions I get the sense that your idea of SF as a mode is partly about contextual dewarping, partly about purpose (articulating a rational, intelligible worldview.) That’s fair enough, but a position like that is in an interzone between traditional notions of SF that are more rigid on the one hand, more flexible on the other.

In fact, it’s not just a matter of looser but of different protocols and purposes coming into play within the field — radically different. Different enough that many works conventionally labelled SF might well be better talked of in specifics rather than under that umbrella term, in case we end up judging them in terms of protocols and purposes that are really of little relevance. I mean, sure, one might decide that all works utilising the novum should conform to certain protocols and purposes, such that a work which doesn’t is “bad SF,” but if it’s playing by different rules it’s not trying to be SF on your terms. That’s where I want to get past the observation that something doesn’t fit well in “the” SF mode, and focus on the specifics of its own protocols and purposes.

If you want to insist that your idea of SF as a mode is a definitive description of what “science fiction” is, to be honest, I think it could probably be articulated quite clearly and coherently within that theory of narrative modalities, built from the ground up. Credibility threshold, credibility shift and idea advocacy seem pretty strongly related to your focus on a rationalist worldview as a core feature.

Unless it is. Unless satire is simply the lens through which that subject — war — is tackled. As with CATCH-22, say. As with both examples — two satires recognised conventionally as war novels — as opposed to your example of a satire which is not a war novel. That’s kind of like saying a sonnet isn’t a sonnet if it’s funny, then pointing at some other type of funny poem which shares some features of the sonnet but isn’t a sonnet, in order to say, “see, in a funny poem, the formal structure is not the point.” As I say: unless it is.

Either that or presumably, with any work that’s satirical rather than solemn, whatever subject it’s focusing that lens on, that approach makes it essentially different from works tackling the same material non-satiricially. If the narrative element is (extrapolated) science, say, that narrative element cannot be the point. Right? So, with Pohl & Kornbluth’s THE SPACE MERCHANTS, Sladek’s Roderick books, THE REPRODUCTIVE SYSTEM & TIK-TOK, Vonnegut’s CAT’S CRADLE, GALAPAGOS and so on, these being satires, the narrative element about science, whatever, is not the point. But you’d class these as (in the mode of) science fiction, right? Similarly, most of us (I reckon) would class CATCH-22 as a war novel.

(And if you’re drawing the distinction at the novel level… so DON QUIXOTE and GULLIVER’S TRAVELS aren’t satirical novels? Or Fielding’s TOM JONES? Or Sterne’s TRISTRAM SHANDY? A work can’t be both satirical and work as a story? Seriously?)

With “science fiction” and “war novels,” the point is, I know I’d be completely happy using both labels as descriptiors like that, indicating openly defined aesthetic idioms — fiction of science, novels of war — except that with one you just can’t get away from the multiple mutually-incompatible closed definitions and the way the term has actually become a brand label rather than a descriptor. Like, although “personal computer” as a descriptor doesn’t actually specify a particular type of architecture, “PC” is now synonymous with “IBM-clone.” Even “desktop” is actually implicit in that term now for many; Googling “PC or laptop” brings up plenty of hits where those two terms are used to refer to discrete types of things. Or if you tried refer to contemporary American clothing customs/styles in general as “American apparel,” you’d be inviting confusion given that most understand this phrase as a brand label: American Apparel.

Practically speaking, if “comfi” really was a label that pointed in muliple vague directions at once, then arguments about what “comfi” really is would rapidly terminate in terminal confusion.

Absolutely. My point being, that’s how it is with “scifi”. It has a brand image as distinct as American Apparel and even as a descriptive label… it’s worse than “PC.” With “PC” it’s only a very few for whom any sort of “personal computer” will be covered under that term. For some laptops will be covered and for others they won’t, but that’s no big deal. For virtually everyone that label would exclude Macs. So if you want to talk about WIMP-interfaced computers for personal use, regardless of OS or desktop/laptop/tablet form, you might get away with using “personal computers” but using “PC” is likely to cause confusion given that you’re actually including Macs. With “scifi,” the problem is, those who would include the equivalents of this OS and that physical form are hotly contested by those who would exclude them. Many are, I think, doing the equivalent of identifying “PC” directly with Windows desktops, excluding laptops and Macs — excluding even Linux and Linux-based OS’s. The whole discourse is like a crazy turf war over what really constitutes a “PC”.

Whatever, I say; I’ll just talk about “private computers” when I want to talk generally, and about specific OS’s and physical forms wherever that is relevant. While any Linux user kicking against the public perception of PCs might be better off acknowledging how much of the “always fucking crashing” stigma is an inevitable product of Microsoft’s “fudge it, flog it, fix it” philosophy rather than some rampant irrational prejudice against “personal computers.”

The Iron Heel is a satire in the fashion of The Battle of Dorking, a warning of possible things to come. In the course of the novel, there is an extended description of an urban insurrection (imitated by Robert Heinlein in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, I believe,) as well as description of covert ops, espionage and agitprop. If this isn’t combat, nothing is. But as a whole The Iron Heel is not about (revolutionary) war, it is about why people should be socialists and what Jack London thought was a dreadful possibility for the struggle for socialism.

The common feeling is that The Iron Heel is not properly a novel, since the narrative has no inner integrity, in one sense isn’t even about the character of Avis Everhard, despite the great deal of time spent on her “conversion” to socialism. The sense that a novel is a long story in which the point is the story is nearly universal. In a war novel, despite the many subgenres an expert or fan might distinguish, the story about the war, whatever kind, is the point. In a satire, the narrative element about war, whatever, is not the point.

I can’t help but feel that subdividing war novel into those that try to copy reality and those that try to extrapolate reality is useful for those who find future war has a kind of extra kick that makes it entertaining, while those who find such flights of fancy tiresome. Book sellers have found that this is certainly true. There are aficionados of war novels who like both realistic war novels and military sf, but there are more who prefer one to the other, or possibly even detest the other. Thus book shops don’t put Honor Harrington on the same shelf with Hornblower.

So much for my peculiar separation of satire.

Practically speaking, if “comfi” really was a label that pointed in muliple vague directions at once, then arguments about what “comfi” really is would rapidly terminate in terminal confusion. The problem is, like SF, there is just enough objectivity to the term to support the arugments, even enough to make marketing SF practicable (or was, when SF was popular enough for separate marketing.) There is even enough objectivity to the term that everybody can poke fun at Margaret Atwood for saying she doesn’t write SF.

My wish is that people would move on past the observation that something is in the SF mode and focus on the type of story, mystery, romance, adventure, whatever, which is where the useful discussion takes place. Saying something is SF is like observing something is historical fiction. You need to see whether the history (or science) is screwed up, and if so, whether it is screwed up to useful purpose or not. Then you move on to other issues pertinent to the actual genre of story. But if you can’t even decide that much, there’s no point in analyzing stories at all.

Well, my wishes are not pertinent to much of anything. For example, I wished to get past Romantic vs. Realist. I don’t think Realist is a synonym for rational or intelligible, nor do I think Romantic is a synonym for irrational or unintelligible. Narrative, including romantic narrative, is a way of making sense, making rational, intelligible the world, even in feel good stories.

Feel bad stories may be statistically plausible but that doesn’t make them any less an effort to make a coherent story of our experiences. Criticizing foolish optimism and foolish cynicism are not the same as rejecting the effort of narrative to make sense, which seems to me to be what so much modernism/post-modernism is about. Rejection of narrative as the illusion of rationality, deluding itself as to the intelligibility of the world, is an ideological tenet, not an esthetic one, I think.

Stories, like the people who make them, always have the peril of lapsing into rationalizations instead of reasoning. It occurs to me that this is what criticism is about and why it’s important.

Trying to think of an entirely different approach, from sheer perversity in one sense, as a check on my reasoning, thinking of stories strictly as entertainment, it seems to me there are the comfort stories and the shock stories. But the shock stories themselves come in two types, the shock of the new and the shock of recognition. The first rule is that mixing the types is bad. (Another rule is that there are no rules that cannot be successfully broken.) If you can’t quit equating Realist with rational and Romantic with, what, exactly, the anarchy of existence maybe, would this approach be useful for a new perspective?

That is kind of the point — being obscured by the shorthand of “comfi” and conflations of different periods in the development of the label. The genre that’s essentially a subgenre of Pulp Action/Adventure is “combatifiction.” You get an essentially new genre — Combat Fiction — when this is rationalised. This, you could well argue, almost immediately abandons conventions and ceases to be a genre, becomes a mode/idiom at best — “combat fiction.” By the time “comfi” catches on as a label, it’s not even that — even before the New Wave come along. “Comfi” is not and never has been a genre or mode/idiom — just a nominal label pointing in a vague direction… multiple vague directions at once, in fact. Were it not for the overload of meanings, “combat fiction” might be a good label for the sort of mode/idiom one might distinguish among the mass of works sold as Combat Fiction and indeed among the mass of works not sold under that label. But my point is precisely that I find this critically impracticable. As with “science fiction.”

I do think “war novel” is useful, but you draw a line here that seems curious:

My division is between satires/polemics, what might be called national novels on the one hand, adventure, etc. versus war novels.

The exclusion of satires seems odd to me. I’d class CATCH-22 and GRAVITY’S RAINBOW as war novels, and I don’t think this is at all idiosyncratic. Its not hard to find people talking of the former as “not just a war novel” or “the greatest war novel I’ve read.” Which is to say, the term “war novel” is pretty open in conventional usage. It’s openly-defined, descriptive rather than prescriptive, a genre in my “aesthetic idiom” sense, your “type of story” sense which to me allows it to be both satire and war novel — c.f. satire and time travel story. Which of course is nothing to do with pulp marketing categories and the pressures that lead to formulation in them. There’s no reason for THE NAKED AND THE DEAD to be tropeplay for the fans just because it’s a war novel. But with the Combat Fiction label there’d be every reason for people who didn’t identify as Com-Fi fans to suspect it of such. Anyway, satire versus non-satire is just another sub-division of war novels, I’d say, like your drawn/projected from reality split, so I’m curious as to why you’d exclude satirical war novels? That’d be like saying a sonnet isn’t a sonnet if it’s funny, seems to me.

Re your last point: That sort of overlay of genres in the “type of story” sense is where it seems quite meaningful to me to talk of Nemo as an adventure story and trace its Romantic precedents. The fact that he tried to get the science right makes it interestingly Rationalist in philosophical terms and arguably realistic, but actually it’s not at all Realistic in literary terms, which is to say it does not sit in any of the “Realist” genres which were and are ideologically codified to exclude precisely works like Verne’s. In contrast, Wells has little concern for the science and is therefore less realistic, but more Realistic in his less Romantic approach to story. That may sound like cause for exclamation marks (Both, you say?! Both?!) but if you care about that fiction manifesting a view of the world as intelligible or rational, the reason Verne isn’t “Realistic” is the reason, ultimately, that you’ve had fifty years of that sort of fiction being derided.

Since modernism is a product of the two aesthetics, it’s not hard to trace the roots of each aesthetic in fiction from that era, the dialectic that leads to the present-day Literature/Genre divide. The distinction you make between (loosely) modernist and postmodernist worldviews is of interest in its own right, but I don’t see its relevance in terms of public perception. C.f. my response to 4.3. above, I’ve argued elsewhere that postmodernism develops as part of the backlash against modernism, as the ivory tower refuge of non-realists outside pulp, essentially rendered safe by irony. But that’s not the subject of this column.

The answer is, that wasn’t what you were really driving at. In clarification, first, the definition of comfi includes a “core focus in terms of theme or plot.” Second, the existence of combat isn’t a useful identifier for comfi, because essentially comfi is a subgenre of boys’ adventure stories. Third, such a broad reading of comfi fails two ways, forgetting that comfi is a pulp genre but missing the essential distinction between Realism and Romanticism.

I conceived the list in my paragraph one as an example to sustain a criticism that comfi was not a genre, nor even an idiom or mode, unlike science fiction or fantasy, making the whole notion an awkwardly conceived conceit.

At this point, I have to confess that I messed up my pronoun reference. I spoke of how my hypothetical list could be divided up in ways that had nothing to do with combat, but neglected to actually divvy it up. My division is between satires/polemics, what might be called national novels on the one hand, adventure, etc. versus war novels. “This list” of actual war novels could easily be divided again into novels that could have been copied (drawn) from reality, and those that would have to be speculated/extrapolated (projected) from reality. To compound the inadvertent confusion, the first part of my hypothetical list, the Others, could also be subdivided that way!

Now as to whether “genre” is meaningfully identified with formulaic, works that establish new genres or sub-genres by definition can’t be formulaic. Which is why the war novels tend to come after the markets have developed genres, and the Others tend to be before. There are exceptions, however.

Further, something like The Naked and the Dead, which is a war novel, does more than just amuse fans by playing with the tropes of war novel.

The apocalyptic battle that concludes the action in Connecticut Yanke has some of the same appeal as John Birmingham’s Axis of Time novels. You don’t get much more formulaic than those! Birmingham’s novels are war novels in an SF mode. Twain’s novel is a founder of the time travel story, an SF genre, using genre here to mean a particular type of story (as opposed to narrative form, like epistolary novel,) as well as a satire.

Verne’s Nemo stories are all about war because Nemo is all about war, but they are straightforward adventure stories. Verne’s science is all wet but he certainly tried to get it right, which makes it Realistic. Yet, the adventure genre is Romantic! I don’t find the distinction between Realistic and Romantic to be very useful, much less a pervasive tension. The distinction that matteris I think is between the view of the world as intelligible or rational, versus a view of the world as chaotic, lawless, downright absurd (very loosely speaking, modernist or post-modernist. Emphasize very.)

4.2.) I agree. This is why I don’t find the term speculative fiction useful. It seeks a generality that allows it to group radically disparate works, but in doing so simply abstracts to a quality present in the vast bulk of fiction. In so far as speculation can be tied to the device of the conceit, it’s a little less useless than confrontation — given that all drama turns on conflict, an agon — but the wooliness is part of my point in applying that term. The conceit of CATCH-22 is “speculative.”

4.3.) I can’t see how this is anything to do with reviewers. My focus is on internal dynamics and how that affects public perception. The context of 20th century culture where pulp was abjected is taken as a given. I’ve tackled the privilege given to a certain type of realism elsewhere — taking Cervantes as a start-point for the rejection of Romance; pointing at the gradual separation of Victorian-era realism from Gothic Romance, penny dreadfuls, etc.; noting the acceptance of proto-Modern non-Realist writers like Conan Doyle in literary magazines such as the Strand, but pointing at the growing disdain for sensation novels and other “populist trash”; taking the pulp boom of the 1920s/1930s as a watershed where the gulf between “serious literature” and “populist genres” was cemented, became a division between Literature and Genre; and arguing that the backlash against Modernist opacity is what finally set contemporary realism in its 50-year-long position of privilege as the “proper” mode of serious fiction. But that’s not the subject of this column.

4.) Descriptive is always preferable, I’d say. Though I’m not really aiming for an actual definition of combat fiction at all. At most, as I say above, you might argue a mode by excluding all that confrontational fiction, but it would be a mode in which SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE is grouped with CATCH-22 and Honor Harrington instead of THE SPACE MERCHANTS and… well, Honor Harrington. Or it would be one which groups it with CATCH-22 but not Honor Harrington, in which case I’d expect the parallel mode of sf to group it with THE SPACE MERCHANTS but not… well, Honor Harrington.

Arguing the first position in that elsewhen seems almost as woolly as confrontational fiction — but I feel the same about arguing it in this world. Whether it’s a mode of cf or sf, you’re going to have to convince me with sound arguments that the grouping is not so broad as to be meaningless. To argue the second position, in that elsewhen or in this world, is to enter a clash of definitions of combat/science fiction with those who include Honor Harrington as part of the genre — if not the very core of the genre. And really I think it would be disingenuous to exclude the Action/Adventure in either timestream. Denying the contemporary versions of the good old-fashioned pulp just looks like a shallow attempt to win respect with those who cock their snoot at pulp.

But to my mind, in critical terms, SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE is better grouped with CATCH-22 and THE SPACE MERCHANTS, and Honor Harrington is not really relevant. Those three works all tread a similar terrain of satire and absurdism, with Vonnegut and Heller sharing the darker approach and subject matter — war — but with Vonnegut’s approach to his conceits less extrapolative than, I’d argue, Heller’s and Pohl & Kornbluth’s, less of a detailed caricature of our society, but with Vonnegut sharing the futurological tropes with Pohl & Kornbluth, but with Vonnegut and Heller fragmenting the narrative as part of a quite different approach in which plot is less of a concern… but for different reasons and to different effects. This is not to deny anyone the right to look at SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE, CATCH-22/THE SPACE MERCHANTS and Honor Harrington as combat/science fiction, simply to assert my right to address three 20th century satires as 20th century satires.

Actually, much domestic drama — like Dickens — has huge wads of sensationalist melodrama that undermines the pretence that privileges it — that intellectual integrity is about confining oneself to the domestic. All of these writer’s works fit into one genre or another — if only that of “the novel” — and are therefore working within limits of genre. These limits may not always be comparable to the formulaic plot-dynamics of Romance, but sometimes, I’d have to say, it rather seems they are — c.f. Michael Chabon’s comment about the “moment of apotheosis” story. And wholly mimetic fiction is clearly adopting one motherfucker of a constraint. The only thing it escapes, by not being pulp, is the pressure to conform to a certain romanticist plot-dynamics. Again, it’s not unreasonable for confrontational fiction to be dismissed by the general public given the presentation of it as pulp.

If I don’t blame the general public for having this (mis)perception, right enough, that doesn’t make the perception accurate. If it were reasonable to expect a deeply informed and utterly objective judgement from the average joe regardless of commercial marketing strategies, well, then we could say this is unjust prejudice: they are not willing to look past that presentation to see that confrontational fiction largely eschews that plot-dynamics just as much as domestic drama. But I’d say the same about the earlier generation of non-traditional combat fiction.

Indeed, I’d actually challenge the wholesale rejection of that plot dynamics, the prejudice against Romance in general. I have my aesthetic arguments with that approach as a writer, especially when it becomes formulated wank, but that’s a matter of personal taste, so unless we’re talking dubious ethical subtexts I see no reason to dismiss any solidly crafted work of fiction just because it’s adopted an aesthetic I don’t have much time for myself.

Again, no. The genre conventions of Romance are the only limits here, and much of work in the marketing category that still deals directly with combat is not limited by them either. There are still many romanticists working in the field, following those conventions, but satirists and realists began redefining the field from the moment it came into being — c.f. CATCH-22. “Transcending the genre” (to “escape the limitations”) is the wrong way to think of it: the field as a whole is not prescribed to remain “more of the same”, only a traditionalist portion of it; much is actually sold on the basis of being “something different” — as indicated by blurbs using phrases like “transcends the genre.”

Of the non-traditionalists working within the field, some may have been subject to editorial decision, but many are true believers. They loved the generic pulp as kids and still value key aspects of it — the vitality of its dynamics, the relevance of its subject matter. There’s a strong community, and the mass market for “more of the same” supports the smaller hardcore of afficionados looking for “something different” so there’s every reason to take that category label and little reason not to.

If we’re talking about “fair” though, the fans of formulaic fare have a point when they attack CATCH-22 for not playing by the rules. These sort of works are changing the goalposts. The non-traditionalists have a point though too: that injection of rationalism has put intellectual integrity at the heart of the idiom, and the absurdism and non-linearity are actually about greater authenticity — using satire and fragmentation to model the madness of war.

This dismissal of high quality combat fiction as comfi is not wholly unfair either; or at least, it has its reasons. There’s a disparity between numbers and notability within the field. The bulk of works are “more of the same,” but many of the high-impact works are “something different” — so you get “characteristic” works which are generic and “definitive” works which are anything but. The notable works are only notable if you’re a reader within the field though — unless the high-impact extends beyond it, and this largely happens with works traditional enough to be turned into Hollywood war movies. The general perception of comfi is inaccurate then, but not really unreasonable given the pulp marketing strategies that persist.

The sort of works you list as “confrontational fiction” have actually gone a step further, generalising and abstracting from specifically military combat to conflict. (The comparison is, of course, to the New Wave’s shift of focus from technology and the hard sciences to things like sociology and psychology… modernity in general, really.) The general disregard of these works as comfi is no more unreasonable given that these writers have also opted to work within the pulp marketing system. It’s disingenuous to accept the social and commercial advantages (the community & the ready-made market) and then kvetch about the intrinsic downside (where uncritical enthusiasm leads to the cosplay and pandering junk fiction that shapes public perception.)

Arguably, the fans of formulaic fare who resent this further shifting of the goalposts have an even stronger point when they attack it. The earlier generation of non-traditionalists have a point also when they reject this as proper “combat fiction.” The abstraction of combat to confrontation is stretching it.

Not really what I’m driving at.

Firstly, I’d add a qualifier to that “containing as they do…” because these contain combat as a core focus in terms of theme and/or plot. Combat is setting and subject matter, a whole layer of the text. It’s like the “road movie,” maybe, where it’s more than just a matter of driving taking place, but the contents are not quite codified to the extent that, say a “courtroom drama” is. The travel is part of the fabric of the work, but approach is left largely open; the “road movie” could be ponderous existentialist drama, absurdist comedy and/or buddy action/adventure flick.

So, secondly, that’s not what makes a useful marketing category. Stranger Than Paradise and Drive are in different marketing categories because tagging a work as Drama, Comedy or Action/Adventure is more effective. What might have made “combat fiction” a useful marketing category is the division of Boys’ Own style pulp into cowboy stories, spaceman stories, soldier stories, detective stories, etc. according to reader taste. There the marketing category already existed — Pulp Action/Adventure, loosely speaking — and it makes perfect sense to sub-categorise, name the niche and target it specifically. It makes even more sense if in exploiting that niche you’ve found a new direction (e.g. plausibility) that is a powerful additional selling-point.

Thirdly, the works you list have distinct commonalities and differences. Looking at them all as “combat novels” (a la “road movies”) could be an interesting critical approach. There’s a clear division between Realist and Romanticist that it would be disingenuous to elide though. And if the frame we’re applying is not an abstract “combat novels” but Combat Fiction as constructed in the discourse posited (a subdivision of 1920s/1930s Pulp Action/Adventure consolidated and redirected by a focus on plausibility) for many of them, (including some of the most Romanticist,) that frame would be entirely inappropriate.

2.)Stories like Bronte’s Jane Eyre whose titular heroine repeatedly confronts Rochester; much of Henry James’ fiction, from the governess confronting Miles in The Turn of the Screw, the quarrels over The Spoils of Poynton or the disputes over The Aspern Papers; Zamyatin’s We, where one man faces society; Flann O’Brien’s At Swim Two-Birds, in which a writer’s characters defy him; Thorne Smith’s fantasies where ghosts and goddesses collide with ordinary life; Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the most intimate yet most separated confrontation; Nadine Gordimer’s stories of South Africa under the apartheid regime, all have confrontation but eschew the tiresome imaginary genre conventions of combat. They therefore escape the limitations (whatever they may be) of genre, but are unfairly bought in the bookstores as if they were comfi, which is horribly unfair, right?

3.)Domestic drama, unadulterated by Romantic excesses, are to be found in such authors as Dickens, Galsworthy, Somerset Maugham, Margaret Mitchell, James Michener, John Irving. Unlike genre fiction like comfi, these works and authors are not abjected. Like confrontational fiction they escape the limits of genre. So it’s terribly unfair for confrontational fiction to be dismissed, right?

4. What is a discussion of comfi without duelling definitions?

Try as I may to get into the counterfactual spirit, I run into problems. Looking at each paragraph above, we see that 1.) this list quite plainly divides into two groups and it has nothing to do with combat. In truth, war novels really are a type of story (and sometimes a marketing category.) In this list, we easily distinguish those that could drawn from reality, and those that could be project from reality. Any reader could like Wells’ War in the Air, the Hornblower series and Weber’s Safehold novels. But it is more likely that a reader who likes Hornblower will like Honor Harrington because those really are in the same genre. “Comfi” is not a genre. Unlike SF or fantasy, it isn’t a mode either. It’s just an awkwardly elaborated conceit.

2.) General terms are useful in discussing general phenomena. Even in Combat Cafe, however, confrontation fiction is not a useful generalization to help discussion. If you try to apply it, you get Henry James and The Naked and the Dead in the same pot. Not all ingredients cook well together. Whether you call cf a mode or an esthetic idiom, overgeneralizing leaves you unable to discuss how (or if) a story is delivered in an intelligible idiom.

3.) The problem with endlessly chewing over the unfairness of reviewers confusing marketing categories with genres, the problems of the critique of genres and the critique of modes/esthetic are left unexplored. A certain type of realism is privileged in elite critism. Frankly, this seems to have nothing to do with reactionary and progressive fans.

4.) The difficulty in defining comfi lies in the tension between descriptive and prescriptive aims to be advanced by the definition. I suggest descriptive is preferable.

See, the bedrock here is that 1920s/1930s pulp, the dime novels and magazines coming out of publishers like Street & Smith, all of which were Romance — not in the bodice-ripping sense but in the derring-do sense. Think Boys’ Own adventure. Without that romanticist dynamics, you don’t have a mode capable of being formulated into a commercial pulp marketing category; you don’t have Astounding Stories (whether it be of spacemen or soldiers, cowboys or detectives), you have… well, Ponderous Stories. Hell, the reason those marketing categories exist is the exploitability of that pulp dynamics.

The point is, the stresses of domestic life aren’t a part of that pulp Romance, haven’t been for decades. That whole pulp milieu was born of the schisming of novelistic realism and commercial romanticism that took place in the previous centuries, partly from the domestic stuff being less popular, partly from the commercial stuff being viewed as trashy. You’ve got literary review magazines like the Strand that still mix it up in the late 19th century, but “sensation novels” are being scorned, as are most modes of Romance. By the time we reach the pulp boom, the schism is a stark dichotomy: novelistic realism is sold as literature; commercial romanticism is sold as pulp. There’s little overlap, so there’s little in that pulp milieu, in the way of fiction dealing with the stresses of domestic life, for a would-be Gernsback to codify and name as “domestifiction.”

Except… well, strictly speaking, there is a sort of analogue. What you do have are the “true confessions” and “Harlequin Romance” idioms — essentially purely mimetic fiction which takes its plot-driving tensions from the stresses of domestic life but which achieves pulp dynamics by intensifying those stresses. Which is to say, though, to be mass-marketable it has to ramp things up unrealistically; it becomes sensationalist, melodramatic. It’s just that instead of soldiers or spacemen, it’s housewives; instead of Thrilling War Tales, it’s Shocking Everyday Stories or True Love Adventures. You do actually get pulp genres born out of that — Harlequin Romance and Soap Opera. And looking at it like that, we don’t have to imagine a counterfactual here at all. That was the “domestifiction” or our world. Still is.

Still, could we then imagine a John W. Campbell coming along to turn this pulp idiom into “domestic fiction” by insisting on plausibility? That’s really the pivotal point in the counterfactual. What we’d be imagining is an editor of some True Confessions / Harlequin Romance magazine that offered “astounding stories” of domestic lives — seductions! betrayals! traumas! revelations! — laying down a New Way, in which the essential material of the genre — not combat or science here, but everyday human interaction — was to be treated with the utmost rigour. But to apply that sort of rationalism to the human interaction is to apply it to the drama itself and thereby dismantle the pulp dynamics that drives the story. What you’re left with is a novelistic realism indistinguishable from that which dominates the general fiction shelves.

Unlike the science or combat that the pulp genres can cohere around, there’s no marker of difference. An Astounding Stories of “domestic fiction” doesn’t stand as the vanguard of a new genre; it’s subsumed into the mass of literary journals already publishing that type of material. It doesn’t find a whole new niche market of readers who want an essentially modern(ist) fusion of romantic plot-dynamics retro-fitted with hard-edged rationalism; it simply targets the existing market of readers who want the human dramas and who are already being catered for via Harper’s, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and so on.

So I don’t see a workable counterfactual there with that mode of Contemporary Realism as a pulp genre. You’d have to rewind over a century and posit a complete reversal of values, a situation in which sensation novels, and all the various modes of Romance which spawned the pulps — think Conan Doyle, Haggard, Buchan, etc. — held little mass appeal, while the penny dreadfuls were exploiting an insatiable public appetite for Proustian realism. To have middle-brow/high-brow novelistic realism despised as pulp, I mean, it has to become pulp — amenable to being formulated and mass-produced; and it has to be so in contradistinction to its polar opposite — the romance it’s eschewing precisely because of the “sensationalism.”

In that elsewhen, your hardcore cf fan would be quick to point out that Rowling’s fiction is most decidedly not cf. A notable cf author would write of walking out of the Hugo Ceremony in disgust, (the Hugo being named after Gernsback, pioneer of what he dubbed “combatifiction”,) outraged that this kid’s “sleuthing” novel was even nominated, seeing that sort of intrigue as a pernicious adulteration of the genre. In that elsewhen, subterfuge is to open conflict as magic is to science here for many readers. The “hard cf” reader would come out in hives at Harry sneaking around in his invisibility cloak.

A better parallel might have been to posit the Alex Rider books as the Mad Craze in this world rather than Harry Potter, but the superspy idiom there is so close to James Bond that the Rider books are more like this elsewhen’s Eragon. So, just as HP isn’t the Tolkienesque secondary world epic that dominates the Fantasy genre here, it isn’t the Flemingesque superspy story that dominates the Intrigue genre there. But there’s a distinct Hardy Boys / Nancy Drew style sleuthing going on and a classic Epic Intrigue villain in the form of Voldemort — an Evil Genius bent on world domination.

With other examples… well, with references like War Stars or 2001: A Space Iliad, I’m just messing around and leaving you to imagine the quite different movies those might be.