Noted: Delany on sf's "fictivity" and "double futurity"

As I begin slowly to make my way through Samuel R. Delany's recently reissued The American Shore, I am gratified to see him approaching — from his very different directions, for his very different reasons — many of the same issues I discussed recently in my two posts on what I called the fictional writer and the fictional reader. (I'm also glad that I wrote those posts before I read this passage, because if I hadn't they probably would have turned into still more thoughts-on-passages-from-Delany lingering in my drafts and notes, along with countless others; and too I might have lost some of those aspects of my thought not directly relevant to Delany's here.)

From the commentary on lexia 2:

With the reader located firmly at the only real present, and the object and the speaker organized out from that present, we see that the fictivity of the science fiction story is structured differently from the fictivity of the mundane fiction story. In a third-person, past tense tale of mundane fiction, the incidents are "false" but the telling is "true." The incidents take place "before" the telling; the telling takes place "before" the reading. In a third-person, past tense mundane fiction, therefore, a simple temporal path leads away from the (present) reading back through the telling into a past that becomes more and more fictive (i.e., "false") the further back it goes. In a third-person, past tense science fiction tale, however, this path is looped into a bizarre knot in which we find the first tensions of that special charge unique to the s-f genre; we find it with the occurrence of the first verb. The incidents, which are false, occur in the future. But as the narrative voice places them in its past, the telling must (fictively) occur farther in the future than the incidents. Therefore, the ordinary fictive voice of science fiction is even more fictional than the incidents; the telling is less true than the incidents recounted. The narrative voice of science fiction (unlike the narrative voice of mundane fiction) is more fictional than the incidents it recounts. (A number of s-f writers have conscientiously exploited this: the "telling" of Asimov's Foundation series takes place specifically several thousand years after the incidents — the series posits itself as an historical reconstruction. Several of Cordwainer Smith's tales launch from a distance at least a generation beyond the major fictive occurrences.) The futurity of science fiction is not single, therefore: it is essentially doubled, supporting itself, interwoven with itself, creating a dense fiction by the same process with which it severs itself from the substance of the mundane. In one sense science fiction is a discursive image of futurity speaking of its own exhaustion. In another, it is a luminous interim, where projections from the past may dazzle us in transformation, hung between a real and a virtual limen, a reading and a telling, displaced about a proairetic axis. (The temporal fictive framing of other modes — first-person mundane fiction, for instance, where the telling is fictive, and so forth — is all suggested here: but we must progress.)

[At the word proairetic, Delany provides this footnote explaining the term as he's using it: "Proairesis (Greek, προαίρεσις pre-choice), largely through Barthes's S/Z, has become the term for the acts of fictive characters, e.g., going to the park, plotting, taking pills, dancing, etc.)"]

Noted: from Samuel R. Delany's "Dichtung und Science Fiction"

Also worthwhile: replacing "theme" with "trope" in this passage.

[T]he truth is...you will not find the key to science fiction in a survey of scientific, or even science fictional, themes any more than you will find the key to poetry in a survey of romantic, or poetic, themes. At best such a survey is a pretext for exposing new readers to a range of texts which will begin to familiarize them with the field's conventions, language, and semantic formalities. But to the extent that the pursuit of themes becomes a serious scholarly endeavor whose envisioned end is some goal of thoroughness, comprehensiveness, exhaustiveness, and critical mastery, the results will be more and more impoverished, the fruits more and more dessicated--less and less nourishing to the critical hunger for insight, resonance, and understanding. Themes only provide an intuitive, uncritical similarity within which true distinctions may be teased apart. But a theme itself has the same mental structure as a prejudice and must be treated, critically, with the same skepticism. Thematics--at least as we now know them--are useless for gaining any sophisticated insight into science fiction for the same reason thematics are inadequate to reveal the workings of poetics. For just as poetry may be about anything, in any number of ways, including science fiction, science fiction may be about anything, in any number of ways, including poetry.

Science fiction is no more a collection of themes than it is a collection of rhetorical devices. It is much better seen as a tension between subject and object it teaches us first to be sensitive to, then to expect--an expectation which it proceeds to exploit in as many different ways as there are different SF texts. It is a set of questions we expect to be answered about the relation of word and world, character and concept, fictive world and given world; and any given SF text can foil or fulfill those expectations in an infinite number of ways to produce exciting science fiction.

(To clarify: my feeling is that at this point the major sf discourse seldom even reaches the "inadequate" level of thematics because it is so busy concerning itself with "tropes", at least one step down the ladder of adequacy, instead.)

Samuel R. Delany: Another Roundtable

Matt Cheney kindly allowed me to horn in on a roundtable discussion of Samuel R. Delany he hosted; the results are posted on his blog, here.

Too close, too much

Interestingly, in the same passages of Delany and Josipovici that I wrote about last week I found another striking parallel. In talking about the differences between sf and what he calls literature, Delany makes the intriguing (if at first seemingly silly, or trivial) observation that "the conceptual space of science fiction is finally far closer in organization to the performance space of the circus" than to that of the theater, which he aligns more with literature. His reasons are many, all worth considering, most (for me) quite convincing; but the one that interests me right now is the last: that "the circus was the first art to insist openly that more must go on in the performance space than can possibly be seen at once". Whether the historical aspect of the assertion is factually accurate I am not competent to judge; regardless, the point is well taken, especially when one thinks of such "intensively recomplicated" * sf works as Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination, to use an example Delany himself refers to in this very essay. Indeed that "more is going on than can be seen at once" is in many ways what sf readers and critics mean when they say that the fictional world created by a work of sf is thick, or deep, or full, or what have you.

* The phrase is, I believe, James Blish's.

Meanwhile for his part Josipovici, still working with T.J. Clark's arguments, brings up the marvelous chapter in Farewell to an Idea about the painter Camille Pisarro. In this chapter Clark compares Pisarro's 1892 painting Two Young Peasant Women to one with a very similar "subject matter" painted the same year by Jules Breton, June. "The latter presents us with an idealised scene of country folk at rest for us to gaze at in comfort," Josipovici writes, then quotes Clark, who finds that in the Pisarro picture things are very different:

we could worry endlessly about the peasants' actual poses, and the distance between them, and where the ground plane is; but of course the painting does not offer us sufficient clues to answer these kinds of questions, and does not mean to. It means us to be in limbo. We have to come in close—too close to get the whole picture.

Josipovici then goes on to draw parallels from this contrast, between Breton and Pisarro, to the one he has been wrestling with in his whole book, that between so-called "traditional" literature and the kind he calls Modernist. I might be stretching here, but I think I might not be—is there not a great deal of resonance between having to come in "too close to get the whole picture" in the one endeavor and there being "more going on than can possibly be seen at once" in the other? Obviously these are not the same thing; if they were, we would be talking about one literary tradition, and not (at least) two. But to me it seems that they are, perhaps, different ways of approaching the same thing.* Can I be the only one who feels that there is, or can be, a great sympathy between...what could one call it?...between restraint and excess, minimalism and maximalism, the micro and the macro, the closeup and the (unauthoritative) panorama? And do we not live our lives too close to get the whole picture, in which there is more going on than we can possibly see?

* I'm deeply uncomfortable with that phrasing, but hopefully it can serve for now as an approximation of what I mean.

I just recently read Doris Piserchia's superb, and to all appearances forgotten, 1974 sf novel Star Rider. It's a sort of baroque far future picaresque—a form with a long and wonderful tradition in sf. After I read it, I lamented on twitter that the novel revealed to me a major failing of my enterprise as an sf critic, in that I simply have no idea how to write about why I found it such a wonderful novel. And while there have been before—and will be again, no doubt—books I could not figure out how to write about, this case seems more drastic a failure—for what I loved about Star Rider is very much at the core of what I love about sf as a form, a field, a calling. I still am not prepared to write at length about Piserchia's novel, but I think what I've discovered here is a key aspect of how I feel. Something in the refractory near-chaos of her recomplications, what Delany himself might (or might not) call the "multiplex consciousness" at play in her novel—and many other sf novels both "like" and not like it—something in all of that lives.

My first draft woke up like this: a ramble

A good chunk of Samuel R. Delany's essay on Theodore Sturgeon* is devoted to an explanation of why sf writers of the American pulp tradition (and their descendents) would so often wish to downplay the amount of effort they put into their writing: why they would positively brag that they write quickly and never revise, and insist that what you read is entirely first draft. He gives a number of reasons—all, of course, interlinked. Some I buy, some I don't.

* "Sturgeon", as collected in Starboard Wine. It's a great piece of writing, very worth reading—even if it doesn't particularly convince me about Sturgeon, who strikes me as intermittently interesting at best and whose influence seems largely responsible for many of my least favorite aspects of Delany's own fiction. But anyway.

He talks about sf's historical disreputability (and, implied, the lingering ridiculous inferiority complex left behind now that that disreputability has long evaporated), in contrast with the perceived virtues of "high art", literature, pointing out that to work long and hard at something "good for you" can be played off as heroic, while to do so at something disreputable can only be the action of "an outright criminal"—but someone who just dashes off something disreputable can perhaps be "a more or less lovable scamp." As an explanation of a part of what goes on in these writer's minds this makes a lot of sense to me—and is a great help in reading their personal writing fruitfully—though of course both sides of the equation are ludicrous in any real sense (as Delany himself is likely aware).

He also asserts that sf "is a highly affective mode of writing. Our audience gasps, applauds, rises stunned from the seats, falls back limp with hanging jaws—so that the writerly stance of the virtuoso is a valid one for us." I think he is right to bring up the "stance of the virtuoso" here, but the rest of this seems highly questionable. I do not deny that sf readers become highly involved with what they read, but (and perhaps this is just me?) Delany's description of the mode of this involvement rings false. For me if there is one near-universal constant in the sf of the tradition and era Delany is describing, it is what I would call serenity, a feeling of calm that is almost impossible to explain in the midst of all the pyrotechnics and wonder and awe and terror and planets blowing up that sf tends to deal with, a feeling that somehow manages not only to avoid feeling inappropriate to the grand subject matter but even to feel exactly right.* And even beyond this (what strikes me as a) misrepresentation of the readers' reaction, I'm not buying Delany's "so that"; even if an audience reacts as though something virtuosic had been accomplished, this does not necessarily justify the virtuosic stance itself. One would need to interrogate just what virtuosity is, and what problems might be inherent in it, in much greater depth** before having the right to make any such claim; but these are some of the questions Delany seems constitutionally uninterested in asking, and which I find to be of extraordinary importance.

*Remind me sometime to talk about this through Rendezvous with Rama, which though it was written later than the bulk of the work I'm talking about (and despite its more disgustingly Clarkean moments) is my favorite example of it, and of a lot of other things.
**And here perhaps a number of passages from Thomas Bernhard's The Loser might serve well for the opposition; at any rate I won't be carrying out the interrogation here.

Delany mentions early on—and then, curiously, drops—the fact that this tradition we're talking about is one of commercial writing, that for these writers the "work" they put into their writing is—explicitly—work in the economic sense of the word at least as much as in any other. It's their job, or at least one of their jobs. In light of this (which Delany does not go in to!), the claims of the sf writer look very different. Being lazy at work is an entirely different thing, socially and (if you will) morally speaking, than being lazy while making art; and indeed we do see a reflection of this in sf writers bragging about being lazy—but getting the work done anyway, by gum!—while talking about their work as "work" in this sense, then turning around and talking up all the hard work they put in when talking about it as "art". See for example Heinlein's famous (and from my perspective fatuous) comment that writing sf is intrinsically harder (and therefore somehow better) than writing other kinds of fiction. He bases this claim on all of the rigorous scientific and technological knowledge and thinking that (for him) must go on before the writing even begins; and this, to writers of Heinlein's type, is where the "art" of sf writing is located.

Considering sf as commercial writing I think also sheds some light on Delany's "stance of the virtuoso", particularly if we also factor in the peculiar sociality of the sfnal world, the extremely close relationship between writers, critics, and fans that, so far as I know, has no parallel in any other field of artistic endeavor.* Under these circumstances, the writer, whose role in other situations is more closely analogous to that of composer, takes on also much more of the role of the performer than most writers traditionally have.** And what performer is not tempted to make it look easy?

*And in those fields in which the situation comes close, it usually seems to have been semi-deliberately modeled after that of sf.
**Though this seems to be shifting, as the capitalist celebrity cult extends its machinations into every realm it can possibly think to; and at any rate, the distinction I've set up has never been totally accurate—cf. Victor Hugo's celebrity, for example. As a broad generalization, though, I think it can stand.

Delany structures much of this part of his essay as a critique of something Stanisław Lem wrote in (I believe a letter to) Science Fiction Studies, and so it seems a bit mean to go after Lem here as well, but all of this did put me in mind of some comments of his that have always irked me. Lem is a wonderful writer of fiction, of course, a giant; but his science fiction criticism, though at times enjoyably cranky (a stance I obviously have much sympathy for!) and occasionally incisive, obsesses so much over the social milieu of American sf—a milieu of which Lem has no understanding whatsoever (nor has he any reason to)—that it more often becomes next to useless, and mostly just purposelessly infuriating (this is not to say that there is nothing to criticize in this milieu, simply that Lem does not know what it is). In his essay "On the Structural Analysis of Science Fiction" (which I quote in Franz Rottensteiner, Bruce R. Gillespie, R.D. Mullen and Darko Suvin's committee translation, as collected in Lem's Microworlds), seemingly without noticing, he leaves behind structural questions to get in this gripe:

A quite general symptom of the sickness in science fiction can be found by comparing the spirit in ordinary literary circles to that in science-fiction circles. In the literature of the contemporary scene there is today uncertainty, distrust of all traditional narrative techniques, dissatisfaction with newly created work, general unrest that finds expression in ever new attempts and experiments; in science fiction, on the other hand, there is general satisfaction, contentedness, pride; and the results of such comparisons must give us some food for thought.

Indeed they do, but Lem seems to me to be eating a thought-apple and declaring it a cheeseburger. To begin with, I'm not certain I trust Lem's characterization of "the" (which?) "contemporary scene". Perhaps in continental Europe, perhaps even in the Anglophone literary world of the 1970s*, which was a highly abnormal time in that world, he is correct; but in general it is my sense that, while most of those doing work worth reading are filled with this kind of self-doubt and questioning and unrest, "ordinary literary circles" are for the most part filled with precisely the kind of self-satisfied triumphalism Lem claims to find in sf.

*I don't know when Lem wrote the article, but it appeared in Science Fiction Studies in 1973.

Much worse, though, Lem is wholly unaware of the various situations I have been discussing, through Delany's comments, in this post; and as such he takes the comments of American sf writers wholly at face value. But when we consider those writers as working in relative isolation, having to sell the products of their work (and therefore themselves as well), and working in extremely close quarters with their immediately-responsive audience, their words take on quite different meanings. A fruitful comparison might be made with Arnold Schoenberg's self-adulation in his letters, which I happen just to have read; at no point in the published letters does he (openly) express anything other than the utmost certainty in his enterprise and indeed in his primacy over all other living composers; he positions himself as the carrier of the flame of the European, particularly the German, musical tradition (a stance which does not stop him from being extraordinarily generous to other composers when he is in a position to do so). He also talks a good deal about money, of which he never has much, and about persecution—personal, artistic, and (as an Austrian Jew in the interwar period) religious. Are we to believe that Schoenberg, of all people, was never dissatisfied with his work, never distrusted traditional techniques (!), never doubted himself? Of course not. Self-doubt, though almost never explicitly spoken, runs painfully and palpably through all the letters alongside the self-assuredness and self-promotion. In a position like Schoenberg's, all of these strains are inevitable, and all are essential for survival.

An observation I'd like to just throw in here without feeling the need to connect it explicitly to anything: we tend to call sf of the American pulp tradition "popular" literature, because it was bought and sold, but it was never broadly popular in the usual sense of the word until the sudden attention brought by media properties like Star Trek in the mid 60s and, much more so, Star Wars in the late 70s. At the time that both Delany and Lem were writing their essays things were shifting substantially, the beginning of the trend that would lead to the situation we have today in which at least certain strains of sf are totally indistinguishable from "the mainstream", but until then both writing and reading sf were, despite being commercial, a rarefied pursuit of a tiny minority (with a large proportion of the readers also being writers), distrusted and not at all understood by the vast bulk of people.* Sound like anything else?

*This being said, I'm not trying to universally valorize the persecution complex of these writers, which can get pretty distasteful, particularly coming from such a predominantly straight male WASPy group, many (but far from all) of whom, though they apparently didn't recognize it, in their day jobs occupied positions of considerable power in the emerging American technocracy. (On the other hand, the sizable minority of them who were Jewish or other "ethnic" immigrants, like Isaac Asimov, or living lives of grinding working-class desperation, like Philip K. Dick, should not be ignored.) All I'm trying to do is contextualize their comments on their own enterprise.

I set out on this ramble because the other day, shortly after reading Delany's essay on Sturgeon, I picked up Gabriel Josipovici's What Ever Happened To Modernism? to look up a comment of his on something totally unrelated (I no longer even recall what it was I was looking for). As so often happens with this little book that, despite its seemingly restricted subject-matter, seems somehow to encompass everything in the world, I found myself engrossed in re-reading whole passages and finding wholly unexpected, totally new-to-me things in them (this even though I just re-read the whole book a month ago—a completely accidental re-read sparked by a similar situation: I picked it up to look up one specific thing and then was unwilling to put it down again). This time it was the final chapter, the section in which Josipovici summarizes and extends an argument T.J. Clark makes in his (excellent) Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism. Layer upon layer upon layer, Clark himself refers back to Hegel; forgive me for this extended blockquote:

Clark rightly recognizes that modernity is bound up with disenchantment, which is linked to secularism. He quotes Hegel in his Aesthetics: 'Art, considered in light of its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past.' This does not of course mean that art ceases after 1820, only that its ability effortlessly to articulate the world has gone. Viewing Modernism through the prism of Hegel's chapter on the Unhappy Consciousness in the Phenomenology, he argues that for art to remain meaningful in these changed circumstances it has to accept what he calls contingency, and I call arbitrariness. Art's being able to continue, he argues, has depended on its being able to make Hegel's dictum in the Aesthetics 'specific and punctual'. 'That is to say, on fixing the moment of art's last flowering at some point in the comparatively recent past, and discovering that enough remains from this finale for a work of ironic or melancholy or decadent continuation to seem possible nonetheless.' This he calls, invoking Beckett, the 'can't go on, will go on' syndrome. And he understands that once the Hegelian view is accepted technique will always be seen as 'a kind of shame', while at the same time artists, desperate for something stable beneath their feet, will tend, like Flaubert, to fetishize the notion of the sheer hard practical and technical work involved in making art.

I hope to have a post soon (hah!) on the role of "contingency" or "arbitrariness" in sf considered as a field phenomenon (because it's not as though this one paragraph sent my mind going in only one direction!), but for now I think Josipovici's comments here through Clark (through Hegel) can illuminate for us the similar-but-different situations of the "modernist" writer and the sf writer, and why these situations give rise to such seemingly different self-evaluations. Simultaneously, technique is "a kind of a shame" and hard work is something to be fetishized (the example of Flaubert is probably the obvious one, and Delany mentions him too, along with James Joyce). A peculiar, obviously contradictory situation, but one which does arise quite naturally out of the disenchanted world in which we find ourselves. The modernists, writing for the most part not for money and largely in isolation from their audiences, react with agonized statements of the kind Lem implicitly lauds, and with endless attention to the work; the sf writers, writing for money* and in close quarters with their audiences, react with bravado (often palbably uncomfortable, which Lem also misses) both in downplaying the amount of work that goes into the writing and in overstating the amount of work that comes before it.

*But, importantly—and I think this gets overlooked—not for very much of it. The sf writers of this tradition cannot, I think, be dismissed as mere crass commercialists, for if they were, they surely would have chosen a more lucrative field. A love of what they were doing and a need to do it had to have been involved, and clearly were.

Viewed this way, it seems to me that what's going on here is not actually all that different—that it is not some intrinsic "sickness in science fiction" that creates the seemingly different (and oh so vulgar!) behavior of the sf writers, rather a difference in the material conditions under which the writers worked. In an interview collected in her Parti-Colored Blocks for a Quilt, Marge Piercy compares the process of writing and selling novel after novel to that of building a house, selling it out from under you, and then building another. Asked if moving out of one house and immediately on to another is not terribly difficult, she sardonically replies:

Capitalism is a great assistance in that. Since you sell your labor, in this case you sell the novel, it is literally bought by someone else and belongs to them, so you had better cut your ties. Once the book goes into production, you must cut the ties.

And that seems as good a place to end this ramble as any.

Noted: Samuel R. Delany on something I hope I'm not doing

The title of this post is slightly off from what I really mean, which is more like this:

I know I do what Delany describes here. The narrative in this passage ("What usually happens at this point...") about the sf critic reading other literature and going "Eureka" is embarrassingly dead on, particularly about how I feel when I read Gabriel Josipovici (though I'm not, I think, so fixated on "terms" as the critic in the narrative, and I'm certainly no more interested in "defining" sf than Delany is--except sometimes as a fun, pointless game). I think, though, that insofar as I do do what Delany diagnoses my enterprise is nonetheless valid. But this passage is a strong reminder of how limited, and potentially limiting, my "sf is comparable to modernism" (for example) is as a critical stance. I've always known it can't be the entirety of my stance--I focus on it so much mostly as an antidote to the "sf is genre" or "sf is [better than] [the same as] [the only alternative to] realism" or "sf is just entertainment" or "sf is postmodernism" stances and others I dislike--but Delany here has given me a strong challenge to come to terms with its limits and explore beyond them, which I'm not sure I've done, or even if I know how to, as yet.

Anyway, to the passage. From the "Letter from Rome" to Science Fiction Studies, as collected in Starboard Wine: More Notes on the Language of Science Fiction.

Science fiction traditionally appropriates its critical terminolgy from a literary discourse foreign to its paraliterary position in the constellation of discourses that constitutes the contemporary cultural array.

[Here I have elided several paragraphs in which he gives examples: sense of wonder via Auden, literature of ideas from Balzac, cognition and estrangement from the Russian formalists, etc. -ER]

If a modern SF critic goes back to the sources of any of these phrases...that critic will certainly be struck by a frisson of recognition. Something being described in all those sources clearly describes something in the workings of science fiction that, as clearly, justifies the appropriation.... But these critical borrowings entail a certain danger....

The SF critic reads his range of literary texts, her range of SF texts, and soon senses an immediate and intuited difference between them. Against this intuited difference, points of correspondence are noted, illuminated by the different surrounds. This correspondence point often generates a term; often this term is appropriated from the literary field to the SF field.

What this ultimately produces in the SF critical field is an array of terms that discuss only similarities. The field of critical terminology, because it is appropriated, suggests the similarities are much more pervasive than they actually are.

Thus SF criticism presents a field of critical similarities through which the critic, who reads both science fiction and other works, intuits a difference. But discussion (and finally perception) of the difference is limited by the vocabulary of similarities. The critic who wishes to fix that difference is likely to assume that it is simple, singular, and fundamental (as we so often assume about what is perceived as intuitive or instinctive). A critic of greater theoretical sophistication may even suspect that the difference is possibly totalizing; that, once located, it will give the simple, singular, and fundamental pattern, repeated endlessly among all SF texts, that constitutes the grid against which the similarities can be thrown into proper perspective. What usually happens at this point is that the critic, reading another theoretical analysis of literature, will be struck by yet another term that appears there to indicate a process at least as significant in science fiction as in mundane fiction, if not more so. Sighing "Eureka," our critic drafts an article, perhaps destined to end up in the pages of Science Fiction Studies, on how science fiction accomplishes x, y, or z. Our critic hints (or declares, depending on natural modesty) that x, y, or z is now put forward as a possible definition of science fiction--although what has occurred, of course, is simply that another term, suggesting yet another similarity between literature and science fiction, has been appropriated into the rhetorical battery of SF criticism, furthering a process I hope we can all agree is counterproductive.

Coincidentally, About 5,175 Words

L. Timmel Duchamp recently linked to and discussed a post by Jonathan McCalmont entitled "Annoyed With The History Of Science Fiction." It is (as Duchamp says) a very useful rant inspired by yet another post, this one a naïve and frankly unnecessary reappraisal of Robert A. Heinlein by Gary Westfahl. McCalmont's subject is not so much Westfahl's arguments regarding Heinlein as the broader critical naïveté in the sf field which Westfahl's essay, to McCalmont, represents, and a call for a more sophisticated, "technical" sf criticism. The problem, he says, is that too much sf criticism relies on simplistic historical approaches and catalogs of plot synopses, resulting in a so-called criticism that is more an accumulation of half-baked, unsupported assertions and superficial natterings about personality and "influence" than any kind of attempt to come to terms with the texts at hand--and their relationships to the world. A better approach is emblematized for McCalmont--and me, and, it would appear, Duchamp--by Samuel R. Delany's famous essay "About 5,175 Words," which, McCalmont argues, issued a vital call for more that was, for all the attention the essay received and continues to receive, never particularly answered.

McCalmont's essay and Duchamp's brief but provocative response (in which she issues her own call for more analysis of sf's "special, particular aesthetics and sensibility," particularly as it is currently changing, and as relates to feminist sf) both contain a wealth of important material. I was immensely excited to see them, as much in them seemed to cut right to the heart of what I've been feeling about sf, but have only rarely seen discussed. Most exciting of all, for me, is that they have given me a point of entry to get into a discussion of all these issues, which until now I have been struggling to find. There is more going on here than I will be able to cover in a single post, no matter how long (and I do tend to go on), and so I hope to begin here a series of essays prompted by these posts (and perhaps, to a lesser extent, the original Westfahl essay that started the whole thing, as it in its own way brings up some very important points). Topics for future posts will hopefully include (probably some but not all of) the following: a discussion of "sense of wonder," which Duchamp understandably but I think wrongly dismisses in her post; an exploration of some aesthetic issues particular to feminist sf (a necessarily rudimentary exploration, given my apparently incurable dudeness and the still woeful state of my reading in this area); the continued, systematic marginalization of the voices of women and other marginalized people within the sf field; the stylistic and aesthetic features of sf by virtue of which it nevertheless possesses considerable value for these marginalized populations; my difficulties with contemporary sf; and a number of other aesthetic and social issues raised by these extraordinary posts; along with, I hope, many more such issues not raised in them but which I have been considering for some time now. For now, though, I would like to focus on a section of McCalmont's post which Duchamp also highlights, in order to enter into a discussion of the implications of methods of exposition in sf.

McCalmont objects to Westfahl's assertion of Heinlein's influence on the sf field for many reasons which need not concern us at the moment; but what he feels is particularly "frustrating" is that this influence is

not only taken for granted but assumed to be positive. For example, the received opinion is that Robert Heinlein pioneered a number of techniques that are now used widely within the field but when you attempt to ascertain what these techniques might have been you will struggle to find anything more involved than an airy assertion that Heinlein's fondness for sentences such as "the door irised open" marked a radical improvement over the field's historical reliance upon a form of lead-footed exposition now dismissively referred to as 'info-dumping'.

Terms like 'info-dumping' are the science fiction equivalent of the film critic's 'deep focus', 'long take' and 'dynamic editing'. However, while film critics are able to draw upon a rich technical lexicon, the few technical terms used by SF critics generally come bundled up with their own unexamined assumptions about how best to write science fiction. For example, the lionisation of show-don't-tell at the expense of the info-dump assumes that the aim of science fiction is to tell a story that is immersive in that it never causes the reader to break from the story and think about what they have just read.

My own critical interest in the style of sf arose originally from my attempts to understand, both as a reader and as a prospective writer, why it was that writing typically described, even by many of its devotees,* as "clunky" or even just "bad" could have such a profoundly moving impact on me; and McCalmont's comments regarding the infodump,** which to a certain extent mirror many of my own thoughts, are crucial to this enterprise.

*Among whom a common, and to me infuriating and nonsensical, formulation is "They're a terrible writer, but their ideas are great."
**I prefer to write it without the hyphen, which is probably an American thing; your mileage, as they say on the internet, may vary.

Before I go further, a word about terms. To begin with, McCalmont is entirely correct when he says that the term "infodump" comes laden with a lot of negative baggage; however, I see no reason why a hopefully more sophisticated critical language cannot rehabilitate it. It has the advantage of being nearly universally understood among sf readers (i.e., though most readers might assume reflexively that it is a "bad thing," they will all at least know what you mean when you say it), beyond which, frankly, I like it as a word, not least because it really does convey an essential aspect of the feeling one gets on actually encountering an infodump in a work of fiction. So I will use it throughout, in the understanding that it is to be taken as a value-neutral term: indicating only the technique of placing passages of straight exposition into a narrative, implying no assessment of the validity of this technique--beyond, of course, what I state explicitly. Next, though McCalmont uses the familiar phrase "show-don't-tell" (and I shudder, as I imagine he may have, merely typing it) to describe what those who oppose the infodump suggest should be used in its place, to me this is inadequate. Mostly this is because show-don't-tell is a technique typically advised not only for exposition but for "action" as well.* As we are speaking specifically of expositional techniques--and of expositional techniques unique to sf--a more particular term seems desirable to me, and an appealing one I've picked up from somewhere (I have a vague impression I might have first picked it up from Jo Walton) is "incluing": that is to say, the process of gradually "cluing the reader in," indeed by showing-not-telling, revealing information through action which the reader then pieces together as they read to form an evolving picture of the world of the story.** Thus, Heinlein's famous "The door dilated" is incluing, where if he had written something along the lines of "The door was constructed out of a number of separate panels, which by a mechanism were made to etc.," it would have been infodumping.

*Here I find I am running into a problem of terminology myself. To a large degree, every word in a piece of fiction is "exposition," in that it is these words that give us the information out of which we construct the story--and in discussion of non-sf fiction this sense of the word is often the most fruitful. But in this discussion, and in general all discussions of sf, with its highly particular expositional problems, it is useful to distinguish between narrative action--the "what is happening" of the story--and what I will here refer to as exposition, by which I mean the relation of information which we are meant to take as existing in the imaginary space outside of the story, but which is being brought into the story for the purpose (usually) of increasing our understanding of the events of the story. As I am about to discuss, the two goals can be achieved simultaneously, but even in these cases they are worth distinguishing as, to some extent, different goals. There are, I am aware, many problems and limitations in this model, but I think it will serve well enough as a starting point.
**Another advantage of the term "incluing" is that it avoids the tendentious and frankly nonsensical implication (which I am not, to be clear, imputing to McCalmont) that it is ever possible, in the medium of the pure written word, to "show" the reader anything rather than to tell them, and thus in itself contains, I hope, none of the naïve critical assumptions I am trying to avoid. Additionally, the word's formation is roughly parallel to that of infodump, which is nice.

There is, I think, to some extent a general understanding among readers, writers, and critics of sf that these are the two primary methods of exposition, and that the central importance of exposition in sf means that these techniques are themselves important. However, understanding and discussion of what the techniques actually are, and more importantly what they actually do, seems generally limited to matters of preference: incluing as "good writing," infodumping as "bad writing," for example, with little discussion of why this might be other than appeals to the supposed virtue, as McCalmont mentions, of a smoothly flowing narrative in which readers can lose themselves.

McCalmont clearly thinks that this is not in itself a virtue, and though all my sympathies are with him in this matter, I find that I cannot agree with his implication (whether it is what he intends or not) that the preference for incluing over infodumping merely needs to be reversed. I think that what is first needed is an examination of what these techniques do, what effect they have upon the experience of reading--and it is my belief that such an examination will reveal that, while the two techniques are indeed vastly different, the opposition between the two is illusory and, indeed, untenable; and that what is needed is not an argument over which is the more valid or useful or beautiful or "realistic" or whatever value-oriented adjective one wishes to apply, but rather an appreciation of the formal/structural issues involved in their deployment: that is, the reasons why a writer may choose here to inclue, here to infodump, and what impact these choices have on the reader.

In Gabriel Josipovici's What Ever Happened to Modernism?, a work surprisingly applicable to the study of sf (and every bit as central to my own current understanding of it as the critical works of Delany and Russ), he says of Robert Pinget's Passacaille:

The narrative is both much slower and much faster than in a traditional novel. Like a piece of music by Birtwistle it spirals forward via repetitions which are never quite repetitions, until we find ourselves in possession of far more information than would have been the case in a conventional narrative or symphony... There is this insistent counterpoint to the detail... The narrative goes calmly on its odd way, as more and more elements are dropped in... [T]he book leaves one with the sense of having participated in the birth of narrative itself...

Our response to it...is likely to be precisely that which Malcolm Bowie posited [in Mallarmé and the Art of Being Difficult] of the reader of a Mallarmé poem: either to try to get 'with panic stricken rapidity' at 'what it means', or to abandon it for ever. 'The double effort required to allow Mallarmé's gaps their full disjunctive power', we recall Bowie saying, 'yet at the same time remain attentive to the multitude of invisible currents which pass back and forth between the separated segments, will strike many readers as inexcusably arduous and unrewarding.' Yet, he concludes, 'the view I shall propose is that time spent learning to read Mallarmé is amply repaid.' I would only add that Bowie is perhaps a little too defensive, or at least that reading Pinget, Simon or Robbe-Grillet is infinitely easier than reading Mallarmé, and that it is exhilarating rather than arduous. But then I imagine Bowie really believes this holds true for Mallarmé as well.

Now, the techniques of Pinget and of Mallarmé are, clearly, enormously different from those of most sf writers (and from one another), and where with the modernists Bowie is correct to speak of the perceived "arduous and unrewarding" nature of the works, and of the value of "time spent learning to read" them, in sf we might replace these phrases with, respectively, "clunky and simplistic" and "giving the writer the benefit of the doubt" (the latter of which in many ways amounts to the same thing). But for me, despite these immense differences in surface-level style and affect, there is a striking resonance between Josipovici's and Bowie's analysis here and the feeling I get from sf novels.

As so often happens, I find that I am having difficulty going on, because my thoughts on these matters shoot out in so many directions simultaneously; all I can do is ask that you try to bear with me as I attempt to put them into some kind of order.

For me, one of the things that fundamentally makes sf, sf, is that it goes out of its way to require more exposition than other literary modes. One cannot just "tell a story" in sf; one must also carefully and complicatedly establish the world in which that story "takes place" in order for the story to be in any way understandable. When you think about it, this is actually quite astonishing, especially considering that it is commonly agreed, or at least commonly asserted, that sf grew out of and to a certain extent remains "popular adventure fiction," in which the straightforward relation of incident, one would presume, should be paramount. But instead, sf by its very nature frustrates the reader's continual desire to "find out what happens next." Is it not truly remarkable that, from the very beginning (wherever one places this: with Gernsback and Amazing, with H.G. Wells or Jules Verne, with Mary Shelley, what have you), we find sf stories repeatedly stopping dead in their tracks while the narration lectures the reader on various matters of fact, real or imagined?

Looked at this way, we could perhaps say that a strength of the infodump is that it delays narrative. It encourages us to stop allowing ourselves to be swept away in fictional incident, to look up from the book and think about what we are doing by reading, what is being done to us, and to examine the difference between the fictional world we are building up in our minds and the world in which we live--in a way that a typical realistic novel never does (indeed, cannot afford to), but very similar to the way that modernist novels do. More, infodumps sometimes allow the stories that contain them to become boring for a time, and here it is perhaps useful to recall Susan Sontag's comment* that boredom can be a valid literary technique, analogous in some ways to the use of silence in music--which use can range from simple, but powerful, punctuation, as in "The Little Girl I Once Knew" by The Beach Boys, to a radical effort to recontextualize the everyday world outside of the artwork by allowing consideration of it to become part of the work, as in 4'33" and other compositions of John Cage.

*Which I unfortunately do not have to hand, but I believe that it is in the essay "On Style," collected in Against Interpretation.

In a way, the notion that the infodump is somehow a "primitive" technique which has been superseded by the more "sophisticated" inclue is reminiscent of the commonly held notion that the chorus of ancient Greek tragedy was a primitive device, and that the reduction of its importance in Euripides and its elimination entire by later playwrights was a progressive innovation to be admired as such, no more, no less. Both narratives rely on an assumption of teleological progress which treats the past as no more than some sort of a trial run for the present, which is parochially assumed to be both universally "better" and the only way that things could have "ended up." In the process, not only the techniques seen as belonging to the past but also those of the present are underestimated, treated not as the responses of artists to the pressures and needs of their worlds but rather as steps in some process of objective "improvement," as though, say, the chorus-free drama was in beta when Euripides wrote (or the infodump-free sf, perhaps under John W. Campbell?), and after the bugs were worked out it was ready for full release later on. In both cases, the actual experience of the audience of the time--past or present--not to mention that of the individual artist, is lost.

What, then, of the inclue? Well, just because I think the "evolution" away from the infodump is not something with which we should be pleased (and that its continued gleeful use by writers who ignore misguided advice should not be denigrated), it does not mean that the inclue is by some see-saw motion necessarily a "bad thing." I doubt that this is what McCalmont thinks, either, or at least not in any strong sense; however, there is a strong implication in his essay that the primary use of incluing is to create the kind of "immersive" narratives that he suggests should not be the goal of sf--as when, after mentioning Neal Stephenson, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Stanislaw Lem as examples of writers who "make frequent use of info-dumps as they believe that wading through densely written expositional text is an integral part of the science fiction experience," he goes on to suggest "that Lem's approach to info-dumping is so effective and idiosyncratic that it not only forms an integral part of his novels' literary affect, it also makes his work substantially more complex and interesting than anything written under the purview of show-don't-tell," or what I am referring to as incluing. His comments on infodumping and these author's uses of it are, as I have said, very important, and I agree wholeheartedly with them; where I differ is in the opposition McCalmont sets up between infodumping and incluing, and the notion that incluing is, or can only be, contributory to simplistic "immersion."

As McCalmont makes reference to both Heinlein's sentence "The door dilated" and the critical works of Delany, it will not be too much of a leap to go to Delany's remarks on this very sentence. In that same essay which McCalmont praises, "About 5,175 Words" (or, in the revised version that appears in the latest edition of The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, from which I quote it, "About 5,750 Words"), Delany quotes Harlan Ellison on Heinlein's sentence--and for once, Ellison has something valuable to say:

...Heinlein has always managed to indicate the greater strangeness of a culture with the most casually dropped-in reference: the first time in a novel, I believe it was in Beyond This Horizon, that a character came through a door that...dilated. And no discussion. Just: "The door dilated." I read across it, and was two lines down before I realized what the image had been, what the words had called forth. A dilating door. It didn't open, it irised! Dear God, now I knew I was in a futuristic world...

(All italics and ellipses are present in Delany.)

Delany, bringing to bear his concept of sf's subjunctivity, comments that the sentence "is meaningless as naturalistic fiction...As SF--as an event that hasn't happened, yet still must be interpreted in terms of the physically explainable--it is quite as wondrous as Ellison feels it." Elsewhere, at "Shadows" 38, Delany has more to say about this sentence:

Science fiction is science fiction because various bits of technological discourse (real, speculative, or pseudo)--that is to say the "science"--are used to redeem various other sentences from the merely metaphorical, or even the meaningless, for denotative description/presentation of incident. Sometimes, as with the sentence "The door dilated," from Heinlein's Beyond This Horizon, the technological discourse that redeems it--in this case, discourse on the engineering of large-size iris apertures, and the sociological discourse on what such a technology would suggest about the entire culture--is not explicit in the text. Is it, then, implicit in the textus? All we can say for certain is that, embedded in the textus of anyone who can read the sentence properly, are those emblems by which they could recognize such discourse were it manifested to them in some explicit text.

There is much to explore here. A good starting point might be to examine the experience Ellison reports with Heinlein's sentence, which it seems to me safe to assume is fairly representative; I know I, at least, have had very similar experiences with similar sfnal sentences. The key here is that the experience Ellison describes is not one of immersion in the story--rather, it is one of being pulled, abruptly and quite startlingly, out of the story. Even more specifically, it is an experience of having been prepared for immersion, of perhaps expecting or even desiring immersion, to the point where the startling element goes unnoticed...until some process in the mind slower than reading forces one to stop, suddenly, to go back and consider what one has just read--and then to marvel.* At this point, the reader, aware (on whatever level) of the subjunctivity of the text at hand, must construct the various absent discourses to which Delany points in the quote from "Shadows"--otherwise, the sentence must necessarily remain meaningless.

*More on this aspect, I hope, in a future essay on sense of wonder.

A common aspect of naïve discussions of these techniques is the assertion that incluing is "more realistic" than infodumping.* Even putting aside the fact that sf, like modernism, is not a realist literature, and that therefore one would think realism would not even be a criterion for judgment,** this is at best a deeply questionable assertion. It is questionable because, and this tends to get overlooked, what incluing ends up doing is turning the quotidian into a mystery or a surprise. People for whom dilating doors are a part of everyday life would not have anything like Ellison's reaction; they would consider Heinlein's sentence every bit as ordinary as we would consider "The door opened." But for us it is startling; it pulls us for a moment out of the story to consider the differences between the fictional world and our own. More, it forces us to reevaluate every prior appearance of doors in the work, should there be any. At this point, I must admit that I have not read Beyond This Horizon (indeed, I have read very little Heinlein, and have not much cared for what I have read); but let us suppose that the sentence before the one under discussion is something like, "She walked to the door." Leaving aside for the moment any consideration of felicitous writing, I find it remarkable that in a case such as this the bizarre readjustment enforced by the definitively sfnal sentence casts its strangeness back onto the more mundane sentence before it, forcing us to retroactively change our apprehension of that prior sentence.

*This is particularly, but not exclusively, the case when the infodumping takes place in dialogue, specifically in the form often referred to as the "As You Know, Bob" dialogue. This specific form is another topic I hope to discuss at length in the future.
**Admittedly the issue of realism in sf is more complicated than I am allowing here, especially as regards scientific verisimilitude; but that, sigh, is again a topic for some hypothetical future essay.

Another way to put this might be to say that where infodumping, as we have seen, delays narrative (what "happens"), incluing delays knowledge (what "is"). In this connection, we should perhaps keep in mind Josipovici's comments on Pinget. Once again:

The narrative is both much slower and much faster than in a traditional novel... [I]t spirals forward via repetitions which are never quite repetitions, until we find ourselves in possession of far more information than would have been the case in a conventional narrative... The narrative goes calmly on its odd way, as more and more elements are dropped in... [T]he book leaves one with the sense of having participated in the birth of narrative itself...

It would perhaps be taking Josipovici too literally if I were to point in triumph to the word "information" here; and yet I cannot help but feel that, though the methods under examination are radically different, Josipovici's words can apply equally to the best sf novels. The reference to "repetition," too, puts me in mind of Delany's assertion at "Shadows" 37, that "Everything in a science fiction novel should be mentioned at least twice (in at least two different contexts)." Delany leaves this deliberately unexplored, and I will for the moment follow his lead; but I wonder if I am entirely off-base in thinking that this analysis of expositional technique, with the assistance of Josipovici's comments, has taken us quite close to what he means.

Though I do not agree with it, I think I can understand the source of the confusion that leads people to praise incluing as realistic, and others like McCalmont to denigrate it for the same reason. This is because formally, if one leaves aside the transformations wrought upon a text by its being sf, the inclue is very similar to the "telling detail" which is so central to the practice of so-called realist fiction. Josipovici is of much assistance in understanding why readers like McCalmont and myself might be skeptical of the telling detail. Again in What Ever Happened to Modernism?:

The notion that the new reality inhering in novels depends on their attention to detail fails to distinguish between 'reality' and what theoreticians call 'the reality-effect'. In fact [Adam] Thirlwell [whose criticism Josipovici has been discussing as representative of this failure] uses the two terms indiscriminately. But putting a faint scar on a face or alerting us to the fact that the carpet is turned up in the corner, like describing the smell of sweat and semen during the act of sex, no more anchors the novel to 'reality' than writing about stars in the eyes of the beloved. The novel is still made up of words, is still the product of a solitary individual, inventing scars, carpets, smells or stars. Of course we warm to a novelist who surprises us with his attention to detail... Too often though...detail seems to be there as a way of convincing us (and the authors themselves?) that what we are dealing with is the stuff of life.

There is much more in Josipovici's subsequent comments on the telling detail that is extremely relevant to sf, but once more I will have to leave it for another time.* What concerns me now is, as I have said, the superficial similarity between realism's "telling detail" and sf's inclue, which I think has led many commentators astray. But when Heinlein says "The door dilated,"** we are not meant to think that we are faced with reality; rather, we are meant to realize how unlike reality the world of the book is.

*I find myself wishing that everyone had read Josipovici's book, and, more improbable, understood it better than the majority of its professional reviewers, so that I would not feel that I was doing its vitally important arguments a massive disservice by leaving them--for now--largely unmentioned. For the interested who perhaps do not have the time right now to read the whole book (though it isn't all that long!), I recommend Stephen Mitchelmore's review, which admirably summarizes and meditates on the central themes of the book, and blog friend Richard's post reviewing the book and connecting some of the points it raises with more directly political issues gleaned from another essential thinker whose name ends in -ici, the feminist historian and organizer Silvia Federici. Another post of Richard's is relevant in exploring some of the reasons all this "matters."
**And I hope it is clear that I keep returning to this example only out of convenience, for the reason that it is discussed both in McCalmont's essay and in the Delany essays, not because I think it is the last word in masterful incluing. I could just as well be speaking of, say, Delany's casual mentions of the crumpling coffee bulbs in Trouble on Triton, or any number of other examples.

In "Speculations: The Subjunctivity of Science Fiction," which begins as a response to "About 5,175 Words," Joanna Russ speaks characteristically perceptively of the peculiar relationship of reality to sf:

In science fiction the relation between the "secondary universe" of fiction and the actual universe is both implicit and intermittently more or less perceivable. It consists not of what is on the page but in the relation between that and the reader’s knowledge of actuality. It is always shifting.

One does not suspend one’s disbelief in reading science fiction --the suspension of disbelief (complex to begin with, as it is with satire) fluctuates constantly. That is, the relation with actuality--what Delany would call the subjunctivity of the story -–fluctuates constantly.

(I posted a longer excerpt, including this portion, here, and if you have your doubts about her conclusions here, I refer you to the rest.)

The method by which this fluctuation is achieved is precisely the interplay of infodumping and incluing. At times we find that the narrative has been delayed, that the book is reminding us that we are living long before the story it describes takes place (or in a different universe, or what have you), and we perhaps struggle to stay interested, or on the other hand become differently engrossed, in what is suddenly no longer narrative; at other times we find that our knowledge has been delayed, that the book behaves as though we are living in the future (or in the other universe, etc.) with the characters, and we struggle to keep our knowledge at a level which will allow us to function in this unfamiliar world.

All fiction lies. For Josipovici and those of us who take seriously the issues he discusses, fiction must be, and must make the reader, aware of the lie in order to have any chance at approaching anything like truth. To speak overly programmatically and risk eliding the experiences of and differences between individual writers in the interest of brevity (hah!), modernism does this by acknowledging the lie, admitting to it, in any number of ways; sf does it by lying so simultaneously audaciously and rigorously that the lie cannot be ignored, by lying in so complex a way that our awareness of the lie fluctuates, as Russ says, constantly (note too that these methods which I am ascribing separately to modernism and to sf are not mutually exclusive). Whether this works in anything approaching a majority of sf texts is debatable at best, as is the question of whether the average sf author is aware of or cares about any of these issues. But nevertheless it is there--latent, perhaps, but there--in all works of sf; and in the best it is tremendously powerful.

Noted: Samuel R. Delany on sf and utopia

What follows is an essential passage from Samuel R. Delany's "Critical Methods/Speculative Fiction," originally published in 1971 in Quark/1, the first in a series of four anthologies edited by Delany and Marilyn Hacker. I quote it as it appears in the Wesleyan University Press edition of The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction.

I will no doubt be referring back to this regularly. As is so often the case with Delany, brief but useful excerpt or summary is made impossible by the extended interweaving of his arguments, and so I present this section of the essay very nearly unelided so that those who wish can refer back to it when I allude to it in the future, so that all of its resonances can be cast over my own arguments. (I am not at all averse to this kind of stealing!)

The entire essay is valuable and provocative, tracing unexpected paths of influence on the formation of the genre,* discussing the mutability of "human nature," and setting forth the most explicit and full account of Delany's view that sf and poetry are very similar enterprises (another topic I surely will be revisiting). All three of these strands then lead into this extended consideration of sf's relationship to utopian literature, which concludes the piece.

*In the process I think unfairly demoting the importance of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne, both of whom after all were regularly reprinted in early issues of Amazing; the then-available English translations of the latter in particular I think were probably vital to the formation of sf's early style as distinct from other pulp modes. I would say that, rather than Wells and Verne having had little influence on genre sf, they had a type of influence which was not what either of them would have expected, nor was it what most people claim it was.

The primary accomplishment of this passage is of course the liberation of sf criticism from utopian standards and history (a liberation which has only intermittently been recognized in the forty years since), which is key to a deeper understanding of the genre. And it is no contradiction to be fascinated, as I am, by the application of this passage to the astounding body of sf-influenced but nevertheless still utopian literature that began appearing in the second half of the twentieth century (many but not all of which came from the feminist movement): Delany's own Triton (aka Trouble on Triton), Joanna Russ's The Female Man, Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed, Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time, the works of Mack Reynolds, Margaret Atwood's science fiction, many of Kim Stanley Robinson's novels, and so forth--all of which, despite their steadfastly utopian aspects, participate in the complex interplay Delany describes here and thus, in their very different ways, become something more than utopian literature.

Please apply [sic]s as necessary to examples of the "universal" man and he. Very soon after writing this essay Delany was to stop following that sexist practice.

...SF became able to reflect, focus, and diffract the relations between man and his universe, as it included other men, as it included all that man could create, all he could conceive.

Already, how much more potentially complex a template we have than the one left us by Victorian Utopian fiction. The Utopian fictions of Butler, Bellamy, Wells, as well as the later Huxley and Orwell, exhaust themselves by taking sides in the terribly limiting argument: "Regard this new society. You say it's good, but I say it's bad." Or, "You say it's bad, but I say it's good."

Auden has pointed out in his collection of essays The Dyer's Hand and then gone on to examine in his cycle of poems Horae Cononicae that this argument is essentially a split in temperaments...

There are, and always will be, those people who see hope in progress. Auden calls their perfect world New Jerusalem. In New Jerusalem hunger and disease have been abolished through science, man is free of drudgery and pain, and from it he can explore any aspect of the physical world in any way he wishes, assured that he has the power to best it should nature demand a contest. There are, and always will be, people who wish, in Auden's words, to return to Eden. He calls their perfect world Arcadia. In Arcadia, food is grown by individual farmers, and technology never progresses beyond what one man can make with his own hands. Man is at one with nature, who strengthens him for his explorations of the inner life; thus all that he creates will be in natural good taste; and good will and camaraderie govern his relation with his fellows.

To the man who yearns after Arcadia, any movement to establish New Jerusalem will always look like a step toward Brave New World, that mechanized, dehumanized, and standardized environment, where the gaudy and meretricious alternate with the insufferably dull; where, if physical hardship is reduced, it is at the price of the most humiliating spiritual brutalization.

In the same way, the man or woman who dreams of New Jerusalem sees any serious attempt to establish an Arcadia as a retreat to the Land of the Flies, that place of provincial ignorance, fear, disease, and death, where humans are prey to the untrammeled demons of our own superstitions as well as any caprice of nature: fire, flood, storm, or earthquake...

Modern SF has gone beyond this irreconcilable Utopian/Dystopian conflict to produce a more fruitful model against which to compare human development.

The SF writers working under [John W.] Campbell, and even more so with Horace Gold, began to cluster their new and wonderful objects into the same story, or novel. And whole new systems and syndromes of behavior began to emerge. Damon Knight, in In Search of Wonder, notes Charles Harness's The Paradox Man as the first really successful "reduplicated" novel--where an ordered sarabande of wonders refract and complement each other till they have produced a completely new world, in which the technological relation to ours is minimal. Now the writers began to explore these infinitely multiplicated worlds, filled with wondrous things, where the roads and the paintings moved, where religion took the place of government, and advertising took the place of religion, where travel could be instantaneous between anywhere and anywhere else, where the sky was metal, and women wore live goldfish in the heels of their shoes. Within these worlds, the impossible relieves the probable, and the possible illuminates the improbable. And the author's aim is neither to condemn nor to condone, but to explore both the worlds and their behaviors for the sake of the exploration, again an aim far closer to poetry than to any sociological brand of fiction.

As soon as the Wellsian parameters are put aside, far more protean ones emerge from modern SF almost at once:

In the most truly Utopian of New Jerusalems, sometime you will find yourself in front of an innocuous-looking door; go through it, and you will find yourself, aghast, before some remnant of the Land of the Flies; in the most dehumanized Brave New World, one evening as you wander through the dreary public park, sunset bronzing fallen leaves will momentarily usher you into the most marvelous autumn evening in Arcadia. Similarly, in either Arcadia or the Land of the Flies, plans can be begun for either Brave New World or New Jerusalem.

SF has been called a romantic and affirmative literature. J.G. Ballard has gone so far as to point out, quite justly, that the bulk of it is rendered trivial by its naively boundless optimism. But we do not judge the novel by the plethora of sloppy romances or boneheaded adventures that make up the statistically vast majority of examples; if we did, it might lead us to say the same of all areas of literature, novel, poetry, or drama; with no selection by merit, I'm afraid in a statistical listing, expressions of the vapidly happy far outnumber expressions of the tragic on whatever level. As any other area of art is judged by its finest examples, and not by the oceans of mediocrity that those high points rise above, so SF must be judged. There are threads of tragedy running through the works of Sturgeon and Bester (they can even be unraveled from Heinlein), not to mention Disch, Zelazny, and Russ, as well as Ballard's own tales of ruined worlds, decadent resortists, and the more recent fragmented visions of stasis and violence. And one would be hard-pressed to call the comic visions of Malzberg, Sladek, and Lafferty "naively optimistic."

If SF is affirmative, it is not through any obligatory happy ending, but rather through the breadth of vision it affords, through the complex interweave of these multiple visions of human origins and destinations. Certainly such breadth of vision does not abolish tragedy. But it does make a little rarer the particular needless tragedy that comes from a certain type of narrow-mindedness.

Academic SF criticism, fixed in the historical approach, wastes a great deal of time trying to approach modern SF in Utopian/Dystopian terms--works whose value is precisely in that they are a reaction to such one-sided thinking. It is much more fruitful if modern works are examined in terms of what they contain of all these mythic views of the world...

It is absurd to argue whether Asimov's Foundation series represents a Utopian or a Dystopian view of society; its theme is the way in which a group of interrelated societies, over a historical period, force each other at different times back and forth from Utopian to Dystopian phases.

In The Stars My Destination, the Jaunt Re-education program is clearly a product of New Jerusalem. Equally clearly, the Presteign Clan, with its four hundred ninety-seven surgically identical Mr. Prestos, is from Brave New World. And they exist side by side in the same work. Gully, though he has been uniformed by Brave New World, begins as an unformed lump of elemental violence, ignorance, and endurance from the Land of the Flies. Robin Wednesbury's home in the re-established forests of Greenbay, insulated from its neighbors, with her collection of books and records, exists in Arcadia. Gully/Caliban implodes into it with violence and rape; and Robin and Arcadia survive to both help and hinder him as the novel goes on. This sort of optimism, emblematically as it is handled, is far more true to life than the Victorian convention that equates "dishonor" with death...

Because all four visions are offered in the best modern SF, no single one is allowed to paralyze us with terror or lull us into muddle-headed euphoria.

In serious SF criticism that insists upon the thematic, I would like to see an examination of how all four of these visions sit in concert in given works. And I would like to see an end to the lauding (or dismissal) of works because they do (or do not) reflect only one.