Mirasol’s crawler loped across the badlands of the Mare Hadriacum, under a tormented Martian sky. At the limits of the troposphere, jet streams twisted, dirty streaks across the pale lilac. Mirasol watched the winds through the fretted glass of the control bay. Her altered brain suggested one pattern after another: nests of snakes, nets of dark eels, maps of black arteries.
Bruce Sterling, ‘Sunken Gardens’
How are we to understand these sentences? How can we be sure that we do not construct something wrong here? One way would be to read on, to discover what these words mean, how we are meant to understand them. But what if there never came an explanation? Would we then be adrift within the text, never able to lock down any meaning, never truly understanding the fiction we are reading?
My answer must be an emphatic ‘no’, since I do believe that we can understand this sentence, though I shall return to it later. The sentence points to the basic fact which I am interested in here, the fact that science fiction (sf) represents a fiction which is built from signs that have no real-world referents. By this, I do not mean simple new words such as Yossarian or Brideshead. Indeed, these words are also fictional to the extent that we cannot find them in the real world, except as parts of books and other texts.
However, we accept such creation as part of fiction, that is what fiction is, as apart from non-fiction, that it is not completely true to reality. In this sense, of course no language can ever be true to reality in any sense. As Robert Scholes says: “Language is language and reality is reality – and never the twain shall meet.” (Scholes, 1975:4). However, as we all must agree, and Scholes certainly also argues, there must be a degree of flexibility in this, a spectrum rather than a complete disavowal of the referentiality of language.
True, some may be more aware of the problem of language’s ability to refer and represent, and we call these texts metafictions, foregrounding the very problem of fiction and of reality and playing language games. They are sometimes accused of solipsistic play, of escaping into a complete web of textuality, caring nothing for what is outside, or even worse, denying that there is an outside, in a vulgar Derridaen move.
Here, this discussion will not be taken up, other than noting that sf is often accused of escapism, something not so far from solipsism, so perhaps there is something inherently problematic or uncomfortable about fictions which are not directly concerned with reality. The ideals of the realist novel are certainly very much alive today, although specifically more so outside the academic institution. That language can carry reference is rarely contested except in specific cases, and in the case of certain fictions.
Here, then, sf comes into its own as a specific genre which creates signifiers which have no signifieds, where there is a greater emphasis on the fact that there is a specific discontinuity from our world. Of course, as a genre sf is not unique in this regard as we may point to a number of other genres which depend on the same function of language. We may generally think of the entire fantastic mode, if we contrast this to the realist mode, and we shall return to this, but there is another type of fiction, though we might not call it a specific genre, and this is non-sense.
So, before I turn to the fantastic, let me gyre and gimble through probably the best known instance of non-sense writing; Lewis Carroll’s ‘Jabberwocky’ poem in Through the Looking-Glass. Since I presume that most will know this text, I find little reason to quote at length but instead simply note words such as ‘brilllig’, ’slithy’, ‘toves’, ‘gyre’, ‘gimble’, ‘wabe’, ‘mimsy’, ‘borogroves’, ‘mome’, ‘raths’, ‘outgrabe’, just to choose those from the first part of the poem. Although we later get an explanation of what the words mean, they are surely not all acceptable explanations.
What we have in the Carroll instance is a text which is intensely self-aware of the power of language and the problem of language. But the use is different, for we are not meant to understand the words which Jabberwocky consists of, rather we are meant to be confused and instead consider what words mean in general.
So, Carroll’s non-sense words do not point to anything in the world, but rather points to language itself, questioning the speaker as much as anything else. This is not the business of sf words, certainly not in the typical cases. The words in sf are quite clearly meant to be understood, if they were not the genre would not be as popular. How, then, are we to separate sf words from the other fantastic genres?
First of all, it must be mentioned that because these words are part of the fantastic mode, the fact that they point to empty signifiers means that they should not be considered as metaphors but rather as ‘literal’ instances of a textual world. This means that the reader must construct a world which is incongruous with our own, rather than regarding these words as symbolic instances. When we read: “She pulled on the headmount: it molded itself to her head with a sensation like a million tiny slender fingers pushed into her hair, sliding along her scalp.” (Cadigan, 1998:68), we are not meant to just read it as a metaphor, but also accept that this is specifically what happens, and that in this world a headmount can mould itself.
It is precisely this sign function which helps create the cognitive estrangement typically seen as a defining feature of sf. By stretching what we are used to reading, confronting the reader with peculiar sentences and words, sf stretches the reader’s imagination and the limits of what we understand, as in this short sentence: “Parked behind the trunk was an old twin-turbo pteracycle.” (Delany, 1971:151) Although we may be able to understand the implications, that this is a vehicle of sorts, probably somewhat similar to a motorcycle, we have no concept of what it looks like, other than having a “black and chrome, bat-form wing” (ibid).
If we as readers are constantly confronted with these unknown words, how do we make sense of the text anyway? I will specifically focus on the processes which fill these sf signs with meaning.
We must realise that these literary signs depend on an absent signified, absent from our empirical reality. However, that should not make us fall into the following traps, the first being to believe that these words are neologisms. It is rare that sf words ever become neologisms, since neologism are new words which specifically point to a new development in society. Sf words are fictive words, to some extent more like Brideshead than cryogenics in that they point to something within the fictional world, rather than something outside or new. There are exceptions, where the fictive words strike too close to home and become incorporated into language. Karel Capek’s ‘robot’ and Asmiov’s extension ‘robotics’ have become standards as has perhaps the most well-known sf word; cyberspace. Today we have surely forgotten that robot originated in sf.
The other trap is to assume that these fictive words are completely arbitrary. While sometimes the words themselves may be completely made up, they practically always refer to specific instances in the socio-political environment they were made in. Capek’s robots, for instance, is based on the Czech word for labour (robota) and is clearly a comment on the times he lived in. These words are not just made in order to support the thematics of the story. It is here that the technique of estrangement probably has its greatest justification, in the way that sf invites us to regard our own world in a new light, and the fictive words become one technique of this.
Clearly, the use of these fictive words sometimes make sf seem far more inapproachable, when the reader is confronted with words and abbreviations such as borg, corpsicle, credits, dalek, doublethink, ESP, ET, flatline, FTL, grok, hive-mind, kipple, waldo and so on. Much of what this does is obviously to not estrange new readers but simply alienate them from the field. This is because of a particular instance of the sf genre, and that is the practice of borrowing words from other writers, so that kipple and waldo are suddenly used by others than Dick and Heinlein respectively.
This peculiar form of intertextuality is something I will investigate later, but for now let us focus on the strategies for using the words.
Sf references an altered and hypothetical reality, rather than an empirical reality. It is in this way that most critics seem to indicate that sf is a metonymic genre, it flows from what is present rather than substituting with something else. This is what is meant through that peculiar sf coinage of extrapolation, that the sf writer follows from what we know into something we might believe to become. Of course, this does not mean that sf never uses metaphor, for it certainly does. When Asimov writes of time travel in The End of Eternity, he is metaphorically altering time into a space, making it something spatial hcih can be travelled unlike empirical time.
Sf does this with a rhetoric of credibility, using plenty of exposition and extrapolation to ‘convince’ the reader that the hypothetical reality is indeed hypothetical, that is possible. There are different strategies for this, one being Asimov, again, when he begins his Foundation novel with a reference to the Encyclopedia Galactica. Not just creating a fictional authority within the world, but even attaching a footnote, identifying which edition (116th) and publisher (Encyclopedia Galactica Publishers Co., Terminus) (Asimov, 1951/1989:3).
Another example can be seen in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash:
That makes it [the Street, part of the cyberspace of the novel] 65,536 kilometers around, which is considerably bigger than Earth. The number 65,536 is an awkward figure to everyone except a hacker, who recognizes it more readily than his own mother’s date of birth: It happens to be a power of 2 – 216 power to be exact – and even the exponent 16 is equal to 24, and 4 is equal to 22. (Stephenson, 1994:24)
This explanation, while mathematically true, remains obtuse to the point of being irrelevant. Yet it brings a certain authenticity to the world, as well as emphasising the status of this text as sf. These extra-diegetic reference is clearly meant to illustrate a form of fictional authority, while at the same time creating a believable world. In this way, the footnote functions as a form of reality effect, in Barthes sense, to convince the reader of the real status of this text, even though it is clearly fictional. We need to remind ourselves here that the text does not try to dupe the readers into thinking that this is actually true, it is only intended to function as a play with belief.
through this ‘technological patter’ the sf text establishes a form of illusory authenticity. This is clearly dependent upon a greater or lesser degree of suspension of disbelief, and is one area where sf readers differ in their appreciations of different works, which is the greatest difference between Golden Age sf and New Wave, though not necessarily hard and soft sf. New Wave is less interested in scientific authenticity and more interested in the crazy prose. The biggest distinction, however, comes from the fans who often choose to read either Golden Age or New Wave exclusively.
What is particularly important is consistency, as it is this consistency which helps create the illusion of authority. Interestingly enough, this has a tendency to lean into realism and hence into an approached form of unproblematic mimesis.
Sf remains within realism as a mode in this sense of being consistent to natural laws as well as the specific architext. Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics is a good example of the impact a single text may have on the genre, and every sf reader is expected to know what these laws are.
It is in this way that sf is similar to realist fiction, in that it presupposes the possibility of a stable relationship between word and world, in this way mimesis is everywhere in sf. This can also be seen by the fact that a lot of experimental sf is hotly contested; is it sf or not. Pamela Zoline’s ‘The Heat Death of the Universe’ is one such instance of fierce debates. Is this sentence sf?:
Until we reach the statistically likely planet and begin to converse with whatever green-faced teleporting denizens thereof – considering only this shrunk and communication-ravaged world – can we any more postulate a separate culture? Viewing the metastasis of Western Culture it seems progressively less likely. (Zoline)
This does not mean that there is no experimental, self-reflexive sf. Consider the two following examples:
“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel” (Gibson 1984/1995:9)
denial of the expectation of port = starport, which denies the typical architext.
Gonzales caught glimpses of side rooms through open doorways as they passed. One room appeared to front upon a night filled with swirling nebulae and a million stars, the enxt on sunshine and dazzling snows. (Maddox, 1991:31)
the enxt appears to be a fictive word, it certainly sounds credible enough, yet we must realise that it means ‘next’
both examples undercut the generic expectations of sf, playing with the reader’s world construction. This still requires that the dominant mode within sf is a strong mimetic one, since otherwise these experiments would make little sense, as there would be no expectations to disrupt.
What we can realise here is that reader, in most sf, fills the absent signifier with a signified based on the architext of the genre itself. Thereby, the sign refers exclusively to a conventionalised architext where the illusion of reality (although absent) is maintained with the same bold confidence in language and referentiality which realist fiction exhibits.
This provides a way of clarifying why sf is so difficult to learn, the referentiality is based on the experience of the architext, which requires reading experience in the field, more than experience of the world around us. Because sf performs this with such confidence and matter-of-fact-ness, we can also separate sf from fantasy.
Fantasy asserts itself as the impossible, where are sf claims to be possible. Fantasy also has plenty of fictive words, but these are either drawn from mythology, or the fantasy text creates its own intratextual architext, which is particular to this specific world and unlike others. Witness the use of appendices in fantasy works, certainly popularized by Tolkien but a function of the type of world created. Fantasy worlds are specifically not ours and not possible, but they are instead governed by their own natural laws, such as magic.
Sf follows from our world, proposing that this is a possible, and so sf denies its own fantastic nature, creating the illusion of belonging to the uncanny rather than the marvellous of Todorov’s spectrum.
They often borrow parts of science to validate what happens. This is the cognitive aspect which Suvin favours so much. The novum, the new, which usually coincides with the word, is validated through science, which is one reason why Scholes calls it structural fabulation, because sf believes in the structural ideology of being able to locate specific structures in the world.
Sf then functions in a similar manner to realism, where semiological compensation, or redundancy and over-coding, help create the world. In sf’s case, this is simply done through reference to earlier works, which is also why contemporary sf is far more difficult to understand than the earlier works of Wells and Verne.
All genres have an architext, but what is particular about sf’s is that it is shared to a greater extent and it is this genre awareness which makes sf so exclusive, in the sense of excluding those who do not appreciate the ‘challenge’ in learning how to read sf.
What is never acknowledged is that the more familiar one becomes with sf, the more difficult the peculiar rush from these challenging words and sentences become. They become, in another word, normalized, as the opposite to estranging. However, these words and strategies are still used for sf’s distinction from not just other fantastic genres, but also the mainstream, particularly understood as the realist novel.
Here sf’s techno-babble becomes important as the specific locus of the distinction. Sf is not ‘children’s literature’ the way that fantasy is claimed to be, for instance in The Trillion Year Spree where sf is the thinking pole and fantasy the dreaming pole ((Aldiss and Wingrove, 1986, p. 205). The notion of future shock is specifically sought after and the words become the emblems of this effect, in a fictional sense different obviously from Toffler’s very real instance of future shock.
Sf, then, attempts to equate what we might call ‘word shock’ with future shock, that if we cannot understand the words, if they are dependent upon a generic architext in order to fill the absent signified, then we have a shock, a sense of wonder, or a cognitive estrangement. This effect, however, is often far too overstated because of the generic control of the text. We would expect that the effect of such an absent signified would result in unlimited semiosis, but this never happens. The genre draws boundaries around this semiosis and in the end, we can see that the function of the sign in sf, is as normal as in any other fiction, it depends on knowing the genre.
Delany argues this when he says: “The writer of mundane fiction [realistic, SLC] tells a story set against a more or less vividly evoked section of the given world. I say ‘given world’ rather than ‘real world’ because the world of the most naturalistic piece of mundane fiction is a highly conventionalized affair; and these conventions, when one studies them, turn out to have far more to do with other works of fiction than with anything ‘real’.” (Delany, 1984:49)
The absent signified is not really absent but is located in the architext, constructed by the reader’s experience with the genre. This is why sf sometimes boasts more than can be said to be true, such as this blurb from Year’s Best SF 3 edited by David Hartwell arguing that it is: “all calculated to blow your mind, scorch your senses, erase your inhibitions, and reinitialize your intelligence.” (Backcover).
Here we see how there is a subcultural distinction in that sf readers believe themselves to be better readers, because sf is ‘more difficult’ than realism. Which is to some extent correct but ignore experimental lit and many other things.
References
Cadigan, Pat (1998). Tea from an Empty Cup, New York: Tor Books, 1999.
Delany, Samuel R. (1971). Driftglass, New York: New American Library.
Gibson, William (1984). Neuromancer, London: HarperCollinsPublishers, 1995.
Maddox, Tom (1991). Halo, New York: Tor Books, 1992.
Scholes, Robert (1975). Structural Fabulation.