Starboard Wine. Samuel R. Delany
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and impossible complexities of “all that scientific stuff” they have tried to avoid all their lives.
In the nineteenth century Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, whose “Dr. Challenger” stories are some of the clearest examples of proto-science fiction, was surprisingly aware of the problem. He talked about it in, oddly enough, one of his Sherlock Holmes tales.
In one Holmes story (the same one, incidentally, in which we learn that Holmes takes cocaine) Dr. Watson is astonished to learn that his friend Holmes, who can infer so much from cat hairs, heel prints, and plaster scratchings, does not know that the Earth moves around the sun—that he is ignorant, in Dr. Watson’s words, “of the entire Copernican theory of the solar system.”
Holmes explains (however disingenuous that explanation sounds today) that, while cat hairs, heel prints, and so on, affect his current life and livelihood, it makes absolutely no difference to him whether the Earth moves around the sun or the sun moves around the Earth. Therefore he doesn’t have to know such facts; and what’s more, even though Dr. Watson has informed him of the truth of the matter, he intends to forget it as quickly as he can. If Holmes is right about himself, we can say with fair certainty that he would be as lost in the monopole magnet mining operations of that outer asteroid belt as any of our 19th-century novel readers—although one is equally sure that Watson (just as Doyle was a born SF writer) would probably have been a born SF fan—had he ever read any of his creator’s proto-SF stories.
But the inability to visualize scenes on the astronomical level does not exhaust the “imaginative failure” of these readers. These readers, who are perfectly comfortable following the social psychological analysis of a Balzac or an Austen, or even a Durkheim, Marx, or Weber, are at sea when they come across a description of a character who, on going to the drugstore to purchase a package of depilatory pads, “inserted his credit card in the purchasing slot; his bill was transmitted to the city accounting house to be stored against the accumulated credit from his primary and secondary jobs.”
To the SF reader, such a sentence implies a whole reorganization of society along lines of credit, commerce, computerization, and labor patterns. Certainly from a single sentence no one could be expected to come up with all the details of that reorganization; but by the same token, one should be able to see at least a shadow of its general outline. And that shadow should provide the little science-fictional frisson that is the pleasure of the plurality of the SF vision. The readers I worked with, however, responded to such a sentence: “But why didn’t he pay for it with the money in his pocket?” and were very surprised when I told them the character probably carried no money. (“But how do you know … ?”) Such readers, used to the given world of mundane fiction, tend to lay the fabulata of science fiction over that given world—and come up with confusion. They do not yet know that these fabulata replace, displace, and reorganize the elements of that given world into new worlds. The hints, the suggestions, the throwaways, and even, sometimes, the broadest strokes by which the skillful SF writer suggests the alternate world do not come together for them in any coherent vision, but only blur, confuse, and generally muddy the vision of the given world they are used to.
Reading SF texts with these readers, I was able to bring them to a point of understanding—for the particular texts we read. But the feeling that they were better prepared to read more SF texts was about equally mixed with the feeling that the real complexities of science fiction were even more daunting than they had dreamed till now.
One reason for the pedagogic problems literature has been having for the last century and a half is a simple phenomenon anyone who has ever traveled in another country must understand: Once one knows a language, it is almost impossible to imagine someone else’s not knowing it. No matter what indications a person gives they understand us not at all, on some deep level there remains in us the insistent suspicion that they’re only fooling—or are lazy, or malicious. The conventions of poetry or drama or mundane fiction—or science fiction—are in themselves separate languages. Once you learn one of these languages and are comfortable with the texts employing it, it is very hard to conceive of someone else’s not knowing this language, especially when the texts are written in English, presumably the language you both speak. Like most languages, the SF language is best learned early and by exposure. Some of my adult readers found it a bit deflating, however, to realize that their twelve-year-olds were frequently at home in both the monopole magnet mines and the computerized credit economy in ways that their parents were not.
At this point, however, it is time to return to our initial question:
“Should science fiction be taken seriously as literature?”
By now we should be able to see that we are really presuming two questions with opposite answers.
First is the question, Should science fiction be taken seriously?
For me, the answer is an unequivocal yes. It is a fascinating language phenomenon, and its intricate differences from traditional “literary” language sustain its interest.
Second is the question, Does science fiction work in the same way as other, literary categories of writing? Here the answer is no. Science fiction works differently from other written categories, particularly those categories traditionally called literary. It works the same way only in that, like all categories of writing, it has its specific conventions, unique focuses, areas of interest and excellence, as well as its own particular ways of making sense out of language. To ignore any of these constitutes a major misreading—an obliviousness to the play of meanings that makes up the SF text.
1. One could make a somewhat fanciful argument that science fiction has grown up to compensate for the fact that, unlike ancient Greek and Sanskrit, modern Western (and Oriental) languages no longer have an optative mood, optative being the Greek grammatical term for the verb mood of a whole tense system from which we get the modern term options—which, as critic Ihab Hassan has suggested, is what science fiction is all about.
2. The French scholar Michel Foucault has suggested that most current critical interpretive methods are simply based on habits of thought left over from the verification procedures once applied to writings suspected of having been authored by saints and thus suspected of being Holy Writ. See “What Is an Author,” in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley et al., vol. 2 of Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984 (New York: New Press, 1998), p. 205ff.
3. Astronomical studies of extra-solar objects and the Oort Cloud have revised much of this over the last thirty years.
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Sturgeon
The most disreputable thing about science fiction is not its nuts and bolts side—its test tube and transistor aspect—nor even its much decried “bad writing” or “impoverished characterization.” They can always be dealt with as demands to regard the text at one degree of resolution rather than another. But what disconcerts a modern critic, leaves this one mumbling and that one mute, is science fiction’s unabashed mysticism. Ready to deal with the ordered (at whatever level of order we have been able to ascertain) utterances of an artist, suddenly we hear clanging from the rocks the brazen tones of the prophet. By having their feet more firmly planted in an understanding of modern science and technology than, say, the run of college English teachers, SF writers are forever using their understanding as a springboard into areas quite outside speculation on future scientific developments (where, despite the spate of college SF courses, most English teachers still expect them to go), into those arational areas about which, so critical philosophy suggests and positivist philosophy insists, nothing can be known—or at least talked about with any clarity.
The preface to the first edition of Leon Brillouin’s Science and Information Theory is dated January 1956. A recent game theory bibliography includes both popular and technical works from 1953 and 1955. Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine was first published in 1948 (and Wiener’s own popularization of it, The Human Use of Human Beings, in 1954). And although the ingenious dance code by which one bee communicates the location of a pollen source