In order to respond to Jonathan McCalmont

[Once, twice, three times an update]

Jonathan McCalmont's recent quartet of posts on short science fiction — first Short Fiction and the Feels and then the series on the first month of both Uncanny and Terraform — have been getting a lot of attention. In some ways I'm glad about this: I think he touches on many important points, and just in general I'm glad someone is taking a contentious look at the field as a whole. It's sorely needed. But in other ways I find the attention, and the lavish praise from some quarters (including many people I deeply respect), bewildering and frankly disturbing. Not because I disagree that the current state of the short science fiction field is unhealthy, but because McCalmont's arguments rest on many premises, and reach many conclusions, that I find profoundly compromised and often just plain wrong — sometimes obviously, sometimes less so. These problems are so tangled, so deeply intertwined even with the good points he makes, that to fully elucidate them would require almost a line-by-line close reading of all four posts, but to everyone's relief — not least my own — I don't have nearly the energy for that. So here instead is a sampling of some of the issues that, for me at least, would need to be dealt with before I would feel able to engage with any of the points he makes that I do find valuable.

In case this post comes to the attention of people other than my handful of regular readers (who know this already), I want to make one thing extremely clear up front: in saying all of this, I am not defending the short science fiction field as it stands; any presentation of this post as a vindication of the field against McCalmont's "attacks" would be a misuse of it. I'm at least as grumpy about the field as McCalmont is, and in some respects my take on it overlaps with his. But this does not mean I can accept his argument, either.

(In what follows I will be treating all four of McCalmont's posts as, essentially, one continuous work, and will jump around in them assuming an audience that has read them all. I will also be mainly free-associating, so my apologies for any formlessness.)

• There being more work out there than anyone could ever read, more than could ever be effectively filtered and discussed, is hardly a problem unique to sf. It is in fact the situation of all literatures in this age of enormous populations and near-universal literacy, and no literature has really come to terms with it yet. This does not mean that there should not be discussions of the specific form the problem takes in the sf field, but it does mean that any discussion of it as a problem specific to sf, supposedly arising from causes intrinsic to the field and the people in it, is essentially a smear, not a discussion. (That said, let me be the first to point out that I have been guilty of similar smears, and may be again in the future. We're none of us perfect.)

• I haven't read "We Are the Cloud" (and am unlikely to), but McCalmont's take on the problems with its "worldbuilding" just makes no sense — bears no relation to reality as I know it — as written. He complains that this "world’s economics are somewhat confusing as some characters wind up needing to hustle and sell off too much of their brain in order to stay alive despite the state evidently paying through the nose for their upkeep." Again I haven't read it and as such I am only responding to McCalmont's description and not the story itself, but if this is what the story presents it is not, as McCalmont asserts, a "lack of precision" but on the contrary a very precise portrayal of what life is like for the very poor and those otherwise at the margins (unassimilated gay and queer people, for example). That many will have to struggle to stay alive while the state pays through the nose for their upkeep is practically the definition of a capitalist welfare state!
  
  Meanwhile, his assertion that New York as a "decaying hell hole" is an "outdated future" out of 80s cyberpunk, "in which the privatisation of public space and the gentrification of down-at-heel neighbourhoods never happened," suggests that McCalmont thinks gentrification (and privatization) are ubiquitous, homogeneous across that ubiquity, and above all permanent. If he believes that, there are some crumbling, empty, very recently high-end condos that I pass by every day of my life that I'd like to sell him.
  
  And finally the mix of "mid-21st century" technology and a "clutter of games consoles and televisions" from the early 1990s that he objects to seems pretty closely equivalent to, say, the fact that I'm quoting him from my brand-new e-reader while writing on an almost twenty-year-old laptop and sitting next to a pile of records that were pressed before I was born, or that people of the generation after mine seem to be returning to tape cassettes of all things, or that I frequently see teenagers on tumblr obsessing over Deep Space Nine and The X-Files. This is, simply, how people live. "The future," when it comes and thus is the future no longer, does not replace (what is right now) "the present" and "the past," it stacks another layer on them. Which is, in fact, something (some) sf writers have long understood.

• Indeed in general McCalmont's notion of the future seems to be bizarrely unitary — once something has happened, something contradictory to it can never happen. In addition to the point above about gentrification, consider for example his insistence that humanity has had a "complete loss of interest in space exploration" in the light of the current push to Mars (bracketing the fact that to talk about "humanity" rather than the state and capital as being the relevant parties in this "interest" is and always has been mystification). This attitude reminds me of Lester Del Rey, who in his intermittently informative (often against his intentions) 1979 history of sf crankily insists that any portrayal of the future needs to behave as though feminism has by then either "won" or "lost," because the "issue" will surely be "resolved, one way or the other" soon — as though it were not an ongoing struggle but a singular incident. If I were better read in Marxism I would probably say something about the dialectic here.

• Very closely related: McCalmont's insistence that sf once dealt with "the actual future" in order to help people deal with the accelerated rate of technological and social changes is a bit of bizarre philistinism of ancient vintage in the field; the vaguely embarrassed awareness, which used typically to accompany it, that this claim was mainly propaganda for proselytizing efforts (sf is useful! honestly! you can use it in the classroom!) seems to be absent here. Such a claim requires one to take seriously Alvin Toffler's "future shock" (which I at least do not, though I hasten to confess that I haven't read the book of that title). It requires one to discard any sf story that did not accurately predict the future as retroactively irrelevant, to discard any sf story that did accurately predict the future (not that any ever did) as also irrelevant (it's already served its purpose), and to discard those works that were manifestly uninterested in actual prediction of any potentially imminent future (i.e., the vast bulk of what's actually been written as sf). It requires one to believe that "the future" is a thing that actually exists rather than a fictional construct, and much, much more. (Let's leave aside for the moment that, as we continue to see to this day, traditional sf fans are frequently among those worst prepared for the changes that actually occur, especially but not by any means only the social ones. If this really is what sf has been for, it has been a comprehensive failure.)

• I find the hurry-hurry to praise — essentially to advertise for — Terraform disturbing in itself. While I'm no fan of Uncanny (and I think he's sometimes very incisive on the reasons why it's not likely ever to be any good), the worst you can say for it, in terms of McCalmont's objections at least, is that it's just people being inane — as people will. But meanwhile he is pleased that Terraform "owes absolutely none of its funding or visibility to the hierarchies of genre culture leaving it relatively free to carve out a different kind of niche." And I suppose it's true that Murdoch-funded hip-for-the-kids plausibly-deniable propaganda in support of the worldwide technofascist-in-leftist-clothing future so ardently hoped for by elites is a different kind of niche. Yay?
  
  UPDATE: I'm not sure that I made my point explicit enough here. It is this: that McCalmont (often entertainingly, often perceptively) lays into the goofy social interactions of the online sf world, as exemplified by Uncanny, while just as emphatically praising the actually much more dangerous top-down capitalist intervention that is Terraform. Intense criticism of people being people versus praise for capitalists being capitalists. I'm not defending the former — and yes, admittedly, by phrasing it this way I'm downplaying its worst aspects, which are real and bad beyond the fiction itself — but this is, to put it mildly, a strange set of priorities.

• Related to this, Terraform's "rush" to turn news stories into fiction "before the news cycle end[s]" is not only a disturbing phenomenon in itself — but one which pleases McCalmont immensely — it is also obviously at odds with his insistence that the magazine's stories are about "the actual future" (and with his — on-point — mockery of "the PR bubble surrounding new [fiction] releases," as though the quote unquote "news cycle" were anything other than a PR bubble).

• He writes that "The editors of Terraform have the courage to set a creative agenda whereas the editors of Uncanny" do not; I have no argument with the second part but given that McCalmont himself later discusses (as if it were a good thing!) the fact that Terraform's "content" is page-view based it's hard to understand how he can believe the first part, or what he even means by it.

• Gratifying as it may be to see McCalmont making fun of online sf culture's outsized horror when Terraform's introductory article behaved as though they didn't exist, at the same time I wish he would display some awareness that Vice's entire modus operandi is to be irresponsibly ignorant of the important details of every single thing it covers (or, rather, to manufacture such ignorance among its readers).

• Then, too, the person he quotes to discuss this mentions Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show as one of the important online sf magazines — and in that culture it is as if that magazine does not exist. He does not seem to notice that this muddies his points.

• Though I have no doubt that Uncanny's non-fiction is and will be by and large trivial, he literally criticizes it on the specific grounds that it is not in the form of Buzzfeed-style listicles. I don't feel that I need to explain why this is unacceptable to me. And really this is just one expression of what seems to be his general attitude that the most important question, for the fiction and non-fiction alike, is whether a large number of people read the stuff (or, really, if people click through), rather than whether the stuff is any good. What people read in large numbers seems to be ipso facto good in his argument, which even aside from anything else is disturbing given, again, the issue of money and propaganda.

• But speaking of, McCalmont's assertion that "After more than ten years in the field, I have never once seen anyone discuss either a piece of genre poetry or an article that appeared in an online fiction magazine" is strange, seeing as oh my god of course he has. Leaving aside the poetry as not particularly in my sphere, I've even discussed sf magazine articles with him myself! More than once! In public! While other people were talking about them too! Not to mention that I'm not sure what he thinks the enormous discussion around Renay's article about writers responding to criticism — which he talks about in a post written in the midst of the four I'm examining now — was if not a discussion of an article in an online magazine.
  
  I mean obviously I agree that the critical discourse in this field leaves much to be desired, but these weirdly untrue claims are not helping anything.

• McCalmont does not understand gay life at all and frankly I wish he'd stop acting like he does. This is clearest in the objection I raised with regard to his discussion of "We Are the Cloud" and its version of the future (he obviously has no idea how poor and/or unassimilated gay people live — I imagine he'd be utterly perplexed by most of my friends, for example), but it is pervasive, far beyond that point alone; every time he discusses any story with gay characters it all just rings false (which is not to say that any of the specific stories are necessarily any better). And this is, after all, the man whose post on Blue Is the Warmest Color referred more than once to "the contours of LGBT life," as though that movie were about people who "are LGBT," whatever that would mean, rather than specifically about lesbians — a word he is bizarrely reluctant to use in that post.

• Related to this but not limited to it, his implication that it is somehow invalid to dismiss Truesdale-style criticism on the grounds that it is founded on a suite of violent bigotries is, frankly, obscene; and given his position in this world's hierarchy of status-groups he has no legitimate standing whatsoever to make such an implication.

• Referring to Ryan Holmes' viciously homophobic review of "We Are the Cloud" in Tangent (incidentally, McCalmont makes no mention of the mini-tempest this review sparked and in which he participated as it happened, pretending instead that he alone decided to pay attention to the story in response only to the review itself; he says some things in this section that to my reading border on lies), McCalmont writes, "Some might say that Holmes' reaction makes him a bigot who should shut his stupid mouth but I would argue that all reactions to art are legitimate as long as they are genuine." I will refrain from expressing fully how this makes me feel. But on a very basic level, if Holmes' reaction had actually been "genuine", it would have read closer to "Enforcing the oppression of gay and queer people results in material benefits for me, so I am going to engage in some of that now" than what it actually said.

• (I'm going to get extremely angry here, but maybe my putting it in parentheses will soften the blow a little. A bit earlier than what I just quoted, McCalmont had written that "It is quite obvious that reading about teenaged boys having sex made Holmes feel uncomfortable (or possibly confused)". The parenthetical, of course, invokes that favorite bit of dogma — and favorite piece of yuk-yuk "humor" — among straight liberals, namely that homophobes are really "just in the closet." They never seem to get tired of this disgusting bit of victim-blaming, most likely because it takes them off the hook: no, it's not straight people who perpetuate homophobia, it's those stupid cowardly gays! stop oppressing yourself!, not to mention that it also allows them to engage in homophobia — it is, after all, nothing more or less than making fun of people by calling them gay — while thinking of themselves as "allies" ("No, you don't get it, I only called him gay because I knew it would bother him!"). I would like to take this opportunity to remind all you straight assholes that in fact it was you, not us, who invented the closet; that we who are "out" of it spend our entire lives being violently pushed back into it, by you, and having to claw our way back out of it again, over, and over, and over, and that it is fucking exhausting; that what we do, how we act, while we're in it is survival and none of your fucking business; and that if some of us do behave oppressively toward others of us because of the closet, that is, one, an intra-gay issue to be dealt with by us on our terms and again none of your fucking business, and two, your fault for inventing the goddamn closet in the first place.)

• Further, McCalmont's condescending amusement at white people who, unlike him, have decided that sometimes it's best to shut our mouths and not always jump in with My Authoritative Opinion On That is not only misguided but just extremely tiresome as well. Timidity can be obnoxious, yes, and Uncanny has more than its share of it; but I think McCalmont often interprets as timidity what is actually letting go of unearned, harmful mastery.

• In general the fact that oppression is something real and concrete that actual human beings have to deal with every moment of their lives, and not just an abstract "issue" for people unaffected by it to have fun opinions about, is something that McCalmont seems utterly unable to grasp.

• Moving on.

• The praise for Terraform's "hard word limit" as if it were somehow unprecedented and radical is bizarre, considering that this field's inability to publish any significant quantity — let alone quality — of fiction in the lengths between short-short and the bloated novel series is at crisis levels.

• While I understand where he's coming from with it (and agree to a large extent with his take on where the field is with this), just because the current sf field has created an artificial dichotomy between "feels" and "ideas" doesn't mean we have to go along with it!

• Not to mention that I wish that just once the people who talk about sf as "the" (or even "a") "literature of ideas" would ask themselves: what is an idea? what do I mean by that word?, or would at least remember, as Delany points out in his third "Letter to Science Fiction Studies," that the phrase itself (which, admittedly, McCalmont does not use here, but on which he seems to me obviously to be drawing) comes not from science fiction but from Balzac and therefore describes something sf has in common with other literatures, not something that distinguishes it from them.

• And on this note, though I do not think that the gendered associations with the (utterly false) emotion/intellect dichotomy in themselves invalidate this aspect of McCalmont's argument, they nevertheless have at least to be addressed; and to be perfectly honest it seems quite apparent to me that they do play a major role in McCalmont's argument as it stands.
  
  UPDATE: I'm increasingly unhappy with how I phrased this. What I mean here is that McCalmont bases his argument almost entirely on the untenable, demonstrably and comprehensively false, ineradicably misogynist (that is, so wrapped up with misogyny that it cannot be untangled from it even in putatively non-misogynist contexts) "emotion/intellect" dichotomy. To this extent his argument is both weak in rhetorical terms — i.e., easily dismissed by anyone who knows the problems with this dichotomy — and essentially nonsense in substance. This is a shame, however, because despite this incalculably huge flaw there is a genuine observation of a real problem in the field at the heart of his argument, one he muddies by behaving as though the "feels/ideas" dichotomy he observes is real, rather than an example of the field's conforming to reactionary ideology even when it thinks it's breaking from it. By doing so he not only undermines his argument in its own terms, he also makes it easier for people already unsympathetic to it to dismiss it entire, including the aspects of it that are important. This is one reason why I think — as I obliquely suggest way down there at the bottom of this post after the bullet points stop — that a better lens through which to look at what McCalmont's seeing is the sf field's ever-present but exponentially increasing self-alignment with "mainstream," "realist," "literary" fiction. But that would be a matter for that other, as yet unwritten, post.

• One of the metaphors that guides the three posts on the new magazines is most clearly stated when he writes:

  At a textual level, Terraform publishes stories that are more urgent but feel less polished... Uncanny is a conventional genre magazine filled with carefully constructed artefacts that have been tweaked and massaged to be everything they can possibly be. Compared to the manicured lawns and exquisite tea services of Uncanny, Terraform feels a bit like a frontier town; wild and woolly but still not quite finished. [ellipses original]

  Later in the same paragraph he even more explicitly, if now somewhat indirectly, compares Terraform to a colony. And though I think the metaphor is both surprisingly accurate and extremely damning as far as these examples go, I think it is damning to both, where McCalmont seems to think he is speaking highly of Terraform — meaning I suppose that he prefers the violent front guard of colonialism to the comfortable home life that violence provides. (And again, need I mention the gendered implications of this as well?)
  
  I find myself wondering: is nothing imaginable in this, whoops, "literature of ideas" outside of one end or the other of empire? (Note that neither he nor I am here referring to the "content" of the stories — by all means write sf stories about colonialism! — rather to their behavior and worldview, and that of the venues in which they appear.)

• Meanwhile, having read a few of the stories Terraform has published, I fail to see the "urgency" he refers to.

• McCalmont laments that "names seem to carry a lot more weight in genre culture than either genre or choice of subject matter," going on to say that people don't so much "aspire to writing about time-travel or zombie sex-play" as to appearing "in a magazine that publishes famous authors like Neil Gaiman and buzzy authors like Sofia Samatar." Certainly "genre culture" is driven far too much by celebrity (though unlike Gaiman, Samatar, who more than just about anyone else I can think in recent memory of has gained her buzz specifically through intense public discussion of her work itself,* seems an odd example). I had much the same reaction when Uncanny first announced its list of who it had early commitments from: "Oh, them again?" (On the other hand it is disingenuous to say the least to ignore the fact that Terraform's launching with Cory Doctorow and Bruce Sterling was just as pointed — and in a much more dangerous direction, at that.)
  
  *And who has people from far outside of sf reading her stories, even when published in sf spaces. It never would have occurred to me that I would ever see Kate Zambreno talking about a story in Lightspeed, but it happened.
  
  And an interesting argument could be made, too, that such attention to names is historically inappropriate in sf (where the author, perhaps, died younger than in other fields?); but that argument is not made here and anyway the rest of this is just sheer nonsense. Every single sf work, from the most bloated series to the tiniest of flash fictions, is hyped according to its microscopically detailed sub-sub-sub-genre ("swashbuckling m/m weird portal mythic steampunk!") and its subject matter ("it has talking cats!"). And perhaps no, individual writers do not "aspire" to stay forever within one specific sub-sub-sub-genre and to write only about talking cats, but I have to wonder why anyone would think they should.
  
  UPDATE: The more I think about it, the more, as William Henry Morris put in comments, "the dig at Samatar really bothers me." And as I responded down there: "I haven't read 'Selkie Stories' and have no comment about McCalmont's, uh, comments on it (beyond what is obvious from the other things I said in the post), but she just SO obviously does not fit the profile he's complaining about that it seems a clear case of something else about her bothers him and he won't admit it, maybe even to himself - and so he shoves her into his grand narrative wherever he thinks he can make her fit." If you've read the post to this point, you probably have a good idea as to some of what I suspect this something else might be.

• Everything in McCalmont's view — and this has bothered me in his critical writing for a long time, not just in these pieces — seems to come down to a question of "authors' rights" versus "readers' rights," McCalmont siding with the latter. All kinds of objections could (and should) be raised against this framing — is it really zero sum? what are "rights" and where do they come from? isn't this just part of capitalist individualist ideology? do we really want a world where readers are entitled to writers' labor? don't enough readers feel this way already? shouldn't critics be opposing this kind of reduction of art to just another free market? etc. etc. And once more, for all his insistence that what he wants is a focus on the work rather than social hierarchies, the work itself vanishes underneath attention to social hierarchies.

• And one of the "readers' rights" he pushes for hardest in this piece is the right to know what to expect before you even begin reading. "Genre culture routinely lionises work that 'breaks down genre boundaries' without ever bothering to understand why genre boundaries existed in the first place," he writes, and so far he gets no argument from me, except of course for my objections to the word and concept, "genre," in the first place. But he continues: "Genre boundaries were not for writers but for readers; they were a way of telling people what to expect when they picked up a book or magazine." And here, of course, is my objection to "genre." Because he's right: this is what genre — as opposed to the concepts I prefer, those of fields and traditions — is for. It is for making sure that art never surprises you, never catches you off guard; it is for making sure it is always safe, will always leave you unchanged. And in the midst of a series of posts in which McCalmont presents himself as opposed to the spoon-feeding safety of sf culture in favor of the supposed rough-n-tumble macho-colonialist well-financed rebellious on-brand 'tude of Terraform, it is bizarre to find him suddenly upset that with Uncanny he doesn't know what to expect (hardly true; the magazine almost couldn't be more predictable, as he himself argues), and pleased that with Terraform — and here he is right in fact even if his perspective on that fact puzzles and disturbs me — "I know exactly what to expect the next time I stop by their website."

Etc., etc. There is more, much more, that could be said, but I have to stop somewhere. Then too there are more fine-grain problems (as when he compares the story about Netflix to the one about Uber and bizarrely insists that the latter "names names" where the former doesn't — apparently because Netflix isn't his personal least favorite corporation, or something), but again: I'm not about to do a line-by-line close reading.

But now, perhaps, with all of this out of the way, one might be able to respond to the provocative aspects of McCalmont's argument. Ever since he first posted "Short Fiction and the Feels" I've had the idea of writing a response to it, to be called "Science Fiction and the Reals," which may indicate some of the tack I'd planned to take with it. I never got to it because the prospect of all of the "though I don't agree with..." "though I object to..." and so forth that I'd have to go through exhausted me. I still don't know if I'll get around to writing it, but at least now it would begin to be possible.

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.