Starboard Wine. Samuel R. Delany
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repertoire of ways to know what the text means, whether it can be done (in theoretical terms) or not.
Which brings us to our second presumption: that the SF narrative works on more or less the same lines as the mundane narrative, so that they might both be dealt with profitably by the same interpretive repertoire.
The play of meanings, contradictory or otherwise, that makes up the SF text is organized in a way radically different from that of the mundane text.
I’ve discussed the nature of the unique organization of meanings in the SF text in some of the essays in my collection The Jewel-Hinged Jaw and, on a much more technical level, in my book The American Shore, in which I have taken a sixteen-page SF story, “Angouleme,” by Thomas M. Disch, and examined the way we read it as an SF story from beginning to end. When we read science fiction carefully, we can see that practically any rhetorical figure operates differently in an SF text from the way the same, or similar, figure would operate in a text of mundane fiction. Catalogues, exaggerations, historical references, descriptions of the beautiful, parodic figures, psychological speculations, even the literal meanings of various sentences and phrases are all read differently in science fiction from the way they are read in mundane fiction. The details do take a book to explain. But the general lines along which the differences are organized are easy enough to see.
The writer of mundane fiction 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.” The SF writer, however, creates a world—which is harmonized with (or contrasted with, or played off against) both the story’s characters and the given world in a much freer way. Certainly this way follows its conventions too; still, rather than simply recognize which part of the given world the mundane writer is highlighting in a particular mundane story, the reader of the SF story must create a new world that operates by new laws for each new SF story read. The various verbal devices SF writers use to lay out, sketch in, and color their alternate worlds, as well as the verbal constructs that direct the play between the world and the story, constitute the major distinctions between the SF and the mundane text, altering the reading of the various rhetorical figures that appear in both texts and generating the different rhetorical figures for each kind of text.
Universities are filled with people who simply won’t read science fiction. These folks suffer from nothing worse than snobbism, and their affliction doesn’t really interest me. But there are many people, both in and out of universities, who honestly can’t read science fiction—which is to say they have picked up a few SF stories and tried to read them, only to find that much of the text, to them, simply didn’t make sense. Frequently, these are very sophisticated readers of literary texts, too.
Several times now I have had opportunities to read some SF texts with such readers, to read an SF text slowly, phrase by phrase, sentence by sentence, checking on what has been responded to and what has not been. When you read an SF text this way with such readers, it becomes clear that their difficulty is almost entirely in their inability to create the alternate world that gives the story’s incidents all their sense. Although these readers have no trouble imagining a Balzac provincial printing office, a Dickens boarding school, or an Austen sitting room, they are absolutely stymied by, say, the contemporary SF writer’s most ordinary “monopole magnet mining operations in the outer asteroid belt of Delta Cygni.”
But the failure is not so much a failure of the imaginative faculties as it is a failure to respond, word by word, to the text. Let’s examine that failure with this particular textual fragment.
monopole magnet
First of all, most of the readers I worked with had no idea what monopole magnets might be. Monopole magnets happen not to exist, at least as far as we know. All magnets that we have ever discovered or created on Earth are dipoles: they have two poles, a “north” and a “south.” If you put like poles together, they push each other apart. If you put unlike poles together, they draw one another. And this is true of every magnet known. For this reason, the very mention of “monopole magnets” means that in this universe a completely new kind of magnet has been discovered; this suggests, in turn, that there may be a whole new branch of electromagnetic technology at work (any electric motor, electric generator, or transformer is an example of current electromagnetic technology), which has reorganized things in the world, or worlds, of this SF text’s universe.
monopole magnet mining operations
I had one reader who, besides not knowing what monopole magnets might be, assumed that, whatever they were, the mining was done with these magnets rather than for these magnets (i.e., according to the schema of strip mining operations or pellet mining operations), even though a phrase like gold mining operations or even uranium mining operations would not have created such confusion. Needless to say, this reader would be perfectly lost in any further mentions of the goings-on in these mines.
monopole magnet mining operations in the outer asteroid belt
Another reader, already as confused as the others over monopole magnet mining, thought an asteroid belt was “a ring of stones around a world.” Well, if you substitute sun for world, you might describe it that way. But when I questioned this reader further, I discovered that the mental picture the reader had was that the stones “were not very big, maybe a few feet or so across” and that they were “packed together” so that they were only “a few feet or a few inches apart.” For this reader, the mines were “probably tunnels that went from stone to stone…. Maybe the stones are even inside the tunnels … ?” And what about the word outer? Over half of these readers thought outer meant that the mining took place on the outside of this wall of stones, rather than inside it. And Delta Cygni? Maybe that was “an area of space” or “a planet.”
Patiently and repeatedly I had to explain to these readers (several of whom, incidentally, had published books or articles on various literary subjects) that the asteroid belt in our own solar system is “a ring of stones” that circles the sun at a distance greater than our Earth’s orbit; and that, although a few of the stones are as large as a mile or even hundreds of miles in diameter, most are much smaller: pea-sized or dust-sized. I also had to reiterate that even the dust-sized ones are miles apart, and the pea-sized or larger ones, hundreds or even thousands of miles apart. (“But then how do they build mine tunnels from one to another?”) They had to be told that Delta Cygni is a star—a sun—in the constellation Cygnus the Swan, and that it was the fourth star named. (“How do you know it was the fourth one … ?” “Because delta is the fourth letter of the Greek alphabet and there’s an astronomical naming convention that says….”) Nor was it a matter of simply saying these things once. They had to be repeated and questioned and repeated again. (“What do you mean, ‘a sun?’”) They had to be told that “outer asteroid belt” was the writer’s shorthand way of first reminding you that our sun has only one asteroid belt while suggesting that Delta Cygni might be a star with two asteroid belts, one farther out than the other. (“Well, how much farther out?” “There’s no way to be sure, of course, but one can make a safe guess that it would be many millions of miles.” “Many millions of miles?”) They had to be told that it was in this outer asteroid belt, rather than in the inner one, that these mining operations were going on.3 (“But how does the writer know there are two? How do you know?”) These readers were all capable of negotiating the nineteenth-century novel, whether it was written by a Russian count on a family estate outside Moscow; or a tubercular parson’s daughter living with her sisters on the edge of an English moor; or an ex-printer in Paris who, having penned nothing but potboilers till age thirty, had decided to try his hand at something more ambitious.
Yet for these same readers a sentence like The stars are suns, many with planets like our own does not call up a clear, concrete visualization, laid out to the proper scale, of the planetary, stellar, and galactic