Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System. John Rieder
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conversing, and otherwise interacting with one another about it: “‘Modern’ science fiction, generally dated as having begun in late 1937 with the ascent of [SF editor and writer John W.] Campbell, was a literature centered around a compact group of people… There could have been no more than fifty core figures who did 90 percent of the writing and editing. All of them knew one an other, most knew one another well, lived together, married one another, collaborated, bought each others’ material, married each others’ wives, and so on” (Malzberg 240). This sort of usage has the considerable merit of making a concrete history and set of motives underlying SF refreshingly clear. Yet an excessive emphasis on the community of writers, editors, and fans in the early pulp milieu encourages an illusion of voluntary control over genre formation that is certainly exaggerated. Even during the so-called golden age of Campbell’s editorial influence, SF resided within a larger economy of genres whose shifting values and fluid boundaries no group, much less a single editor or publication, could control. Genre construction is intentional only in fits and starts, only as localized as the circulation of the narratives in question, and even then subject to the pressures of the entire system of publication and circulation in which it takes place.
Even worse, the peculiar situation of the pulps can be taken as normative for genres as such, as Gary Westfahl demonstrates in The Mechanics of Wonder: “If we define a genre as consisting of a body of texts related by a shared understanding of that genre as recorded in contemporary commentary, then a true history of science fiction as a genre must begin in 1926, at the time when Gernsback defined science fiction, offered a critical theory concerning its nature, purposes, and origins, and persuaded many others to accept and extend his ideas…. Literary genres appear in history for one reason: someone declares that a genre exists and persuades writers, publishers, readers and critics that she is correct” (8–12). If this conception of genre were correct, it could be so only with respect to modern genre practices. Certainly there is no body of contemporary commentary that illustrates a shared understanding of what constitutes the genres of the proverb, the riddle, the ballad, or the epic. But even if one stays within the field of genres occupied by Gernsback, one cannot locate a master theorist or “announcer” for the western, spy fiction, detective fiction, and so on. The more usual case with genres is surely the one described by Michael McKeon in The Origins of the English Novel, when he argues that the novel as a generic designation came to be formulated only when the process of its emergence was complete.
I suggest that it is possible to articulate the anonymous collectivity of the “complex historical process” of SF’s emergence and ongoing construction, maintenance, and revision with the rich particularity of an account like Malzberg’s by means of the theorization of categorization and its uses offered by Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Starr in Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (1999). Bowker and Starr are concerned with the way classifications are constructed within communities of practice, emphasizing the ad hoc supplementation and renegotiation of official or institutional categories by those who make them work: “We need a richer vocabulary than that of standardization or formalization with which to characterize the heterogeneity and the processual nature of information ecologies” (293). They emphasize, too, the “collective forgetting” about “the contingent, messy work” of classification that unites members of a community of practice (299). Full-fledged membership in such a community involves the naturalization of its objects of practice, which “means stripping away the contingencies of an object’s creation and its situated nature. A naturalized object has lost its anthropological strangeness” (299). As a result of its naturalization, it can be pointed to as an example of X with an obviousness that derives not from the qualities of the object itself, but rather from membership in the relevant community.
Objects and communities of practice do not line up simply and neatly, however, because people come in and out of such communities, operate within them at various levels of familiarity with their categories, and may at the same time be members of different communities with conflicting classification practices. Bowker and Starr therefore emphasize the importance of “boundary objects” as ways of mediating the practices and motives of overlapping communities of practice: “Boundary objects are those objects that both inhabit several communities of practice and satisfy the informational requirements of each of them…. The creation and management of boundary objects is a key process in developing and maintaining coherence across intersecting communities…. Boundary objects are the canonical forms of all objects in our built and natural environments” (297–307). To speak about a common ground of SF shared by writers, editors, publishers, marketers, fans, general readers, critics, and scholars might mean to identify the boundary objects that these various communities of practice share. The advantage of this conceptualization of classification is that the communities of practice do not disappear into anonymity, nor do the differences and tensions among their practices fall out of view, nor does whatever consensus settles among them embody the essence of the object. Boundary objects—for example the texts that make up the SF canon—are not by necessity the most important or definitive objects for any given community, but simply the ones that satisfy the requirements of several communities at once.
Using the concepts of communities of practice and boundary objects to sort out the complex agencies constructing SF implies at least three distinct ways of understanding the assertion that SF is “whatever we are looking for when we are looking for science fiction.” First, the “we” who are looking for science fiction could refer to the members of the speaker’s own community of practice; this is the sense it had when Damon Knight wrote that “science fiction is what we point to when we say it.” Second, however, “we” could be taken to refer to all the different communities of practice who use the category, and “science fiction” to all the objects that all of them collectively point to. Any expectation of coherence here is obviously doomed to disappointment, but nonetheless this encyclopedic sense of the genre has the virtue of pointing toward the broad horizon of social practices where the history of genre systems can come into view. Third, science fiction could be taken as the set of objects that all the relevant communities of practice point to in common—that is, the boundary objects “we” communities share.
This third reading refers to a shared territory that is not a matter of giving up on arriving at a definition of the genre, but rather is precisely the product of the interaction among different communities of practice using different definitions of SF. The multiplicity of definitions of SF does not reflect widespread confusion about what SF is, but rather it results from the variety of motives the definitions express and the many ways of intervening in the genre’s production, distribution, and reception that they pursue. A wealth of biographical and paratextual material can be brought to bear here, as in Justine Larbalestier’s decision that “letters, reviews, fanzines, and marketing blurbs are as important as the stories themselves” in piecing together her detailed history of a riven and complex SF community in The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction (1). Brian Attebery’s description of the shape of SF in Decoding Gender in Science Fiction also attributes that shape to the interaction of disparate communities: “Some outgrowths of the genre have so little in common that they hardly seem to constitute a single category. Yet if they share few features, all the myriad manifestations of SF may still be analyzed as products of a single process. All result from negotiated exchanges between different segments of culture” (170). Understanding the relations between its various communities of practice, whether of negotiation or conflict or deliberate noninteraction, is among the most important problems that genre theory poses SF critics and scholars.
Thinking of genres as categories wielded by communities of practice has one final advantage that can serve as the conclusion to this chapter and point our way forward to the rest. Bowker and Starr’s analysis makes all definitions of SF appear in the light of working definitions, provisional conceptualizations suited to the purposes of a particular community of practice and, within that community, to the needs and goals of a specific project. Thus definitions may be necessary, even indispensable, and yet constructing and adhering to a single definition of the genre, far from being the goal of a history of SF, is more likely to be a way to short-circuit it. Definition and classification may be useful points of departure for critical and rhetorical analysis, but if the version of genre theory offered here is valid, the project of comprehending what SF has meant and currently means is one to be accomplished through