Science Fiction, Canonization, Marginalization, and the Academy

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cience Fiction, Canonization, Marginalization, and the Academy

Recent Titles in Contributions to the Study of Science Fiction and Fantasy Spiritual Exploration in the Works of Doris Lessing Phyllis Sternberg Perrakis, editor The Road to Castle Mount: The Science Fiction of Robert Silverberg Edgar L. Chapman Back in the Spaceship Again: Juvenile Science Fiction Series Since 1945 Karen Sands and Marietta Frank Tolkien's Legendarium: Essays on The History of Middle-earth Verlyn Flieger and Carl F. Hostetter, editors Space and Beyond: The Frontier Theme in Science Fiction Gary Westfahl, editor Transrealist Fiction: Writing in the Slipstream of Science Damien Broderick Science Fiction, Children's Literature, and Popular Culture: Coming of Age in Fantasyland Gary Westfahl Kurt Vonnegut: Images and Representations Marc Leeds and Peter J. Reed, editors Science and Destabilization in the Modern American Gothic: Lovecraft, Matheson, and King David A. Oakes J.R.R. Tolkien and His Literary Resonances: Views of Middle-earth George Clark and Daniel Timmons, editors Rewriting the Women of Camelot: Arthurian Popular Fiction and Feminism Ann F Howey Monsters, Mushroom Clouds, and the Cold War M. Keith Booker

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cience Fiction, Canonization, Marginalization, and the Academy

Edited by Gary Westfahl and George Slusser

Contributions to the Study of Science Fiction and Fantasy, Number 97 Donald Palumbo, Series Adviser

Greenwood Press Westport, Connecticut • London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Science fiction, canonization, marginalization, and the academy / edited by Gary Westfahl and George Slusser. p. cm.—(Contributions to the study of science fiction and fantasy, ISSN 0193-6875; no. 97) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-313-32064-0 (alk. paper) 1. Science fiction, American—History and criticism—Theory, etc. 2. Science fiction, English—History and criticism—Theory, etc. 3. Science fiction—Study and teaching (Higher) 4. Canon (Literature) I. Westfahl, Gary. II. Slusser, George Edgar. III. Series. PS374.S35 S3325 2002 813'.0876209—dc21 2001042330 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright © 2002 by Gary Westfahl and George Slusser All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2001042330 ISBN: 0-313-32064-0 ISSN: 0193-6875 First published in 2002 Greenwood Press, 88 Post Road West, Westport,CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.greenwood.com Printed in the United States of America

@T The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48-1984). 10

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Contents Acknowledgments 1. Introduction: Masters of the Literary Universe Gary Westfahl

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Part I. Overviews: Science Fiction and the Academy 2. Literary Gatekeepers and the Fabril Tradition Tom Shippey

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3. Seven Types of Chopped Liver: My Adventures in the Genre Wars Frank McConnell

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4. The Things Women Don't Say Susan Kray

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5. Why the Academy Is Afraid of Dragons: The Suppression of the Marvelous in Theories of the Fantastic Jonathan Langford

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Part II. Mechanisms of Canonization 6. The Arthur C. Clarke Award and Its Reception in Britain Edward James

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7. Popes or Tropes: Defining the Grails of Science Fiction Joseph D. Miller

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VI

Contents

8. Science Fiction Eye and the Rebellion against Recursion Stephen P. Brown

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9. Authorities, Canons, and Scholarship: The Role of Academic Journals Arthur B. Evans

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Part III. Case Studies in Marginalization 10. Multiculturalism and the Cultural Dynamics of Classic American Science Fiction George Slusser

103

11. Science Fiction in the Academies of History and Literature; Or, History and the Use of Science Fiction Farah Mendlesohn

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12. (E)raced Visions: Women of Color and Science Fiction in the United States Elyce Rae Helford

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13. Hard Magic, Soft Science: The Marginalization of Kevin J. Anderson and Doug Beason's Assemblers of Infinity and Bruce Boston's Stained Glass Rain Howard V. Hendrix

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14. White Men Can't. . . : (De)centering Authority and Jacking into Phallic Economies in William Gibson's Count Zero Joseph Childers, Townsend Carr, and Regna Meenk

151

Bibliography of Works Related to Science Fiction, Canonization, and Marginalization

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Index

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About the Contributors

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Acknowledgments We first wish to recognize all of the individuals who assisted in the creation and development of this volume, including Karen Bellinfante, Sidney Berger, Gladys Murphy, Sheryl Lewis, Darian Daries, Susan Korn, Karen Orchard, Eric S. Rabkin, Henry Snyder, and our anonymous peer reviewers. We also wish to thank Donald E. Palumbo and George F. Butler of Greenwood Press for their help in getting this volume into print, as well as our capable copyeditor Lynne Goetz. In response to a request for assistance, a number of distant colleagues provided suggestions for the bibliography, including Rene Beaulieu, John Boston, Steve Holland, Todd Mason, Jess Nevins, David Pringle, Robert Silverberg, Andy Sawyer, Gordon Van Gelder, Jeff VanderMeer, and Bud Webster. We finally would like to thank other friends, family members, and colleagues too numerous to name who provided needed support and encouragement during the preparation of this volume.

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Chapter 1

Introduction: Masters of the Literary Universe Gary Westfahl

Since the words "author" and "authority" derive from the same Latin root {augere, to make to grow), it is only natural for some authors and unsophisticated readers to regard authors as the major forces controlling literature. After all, according to this view, authors are the ones who create and shape their traditions and their works, and so they should be regarded as the definitive arbiters of the meaning and the value of their works. Yet members of the academy see matters differently. From their perspective, it is trained critics, not authors, who are best qualified to delineate literary traditions and to read, evaluate, and interpret literary texts. And, since they are the ones who largely determine the authors and works that stay in print, receive continuing attention, and are taught in school curricula, scholars and critics do exercise eventual, if not immediate, control over literature, deciding that certain texts and genres should be enshrined or "canonized" as fit subjects for research and pedagogy, while other texts and genres should be "marginalized," exiled from literary scholarship and literature classes. Of course, their hegemony does not emerge from an amicable consensus; rather, critics constantly dispute which works and writers should be included in the canon of officially sanctioned texts, and which ones should be excluded from that pantheon. Traditionalists insist that time-honored talents should maintain a central position in literary study, while insurgents champion a number of previously marginalized figures under the aegis of feminism, postmodernism, multiculturalism, gay and lesbian studies, or popular culture. Debates may ostensibly be based on aesthetics, but they are inextricably linked to ideological and personal concerns that can devolve into purely political questions: who in the community of scholars gets to decide what is literature and what is not literature? Each group claims the power to answer the question and challenges the judgments of rival factions. The thesis of this volume is that the literature of science fiction offers unusually fertile grounds for an examination of these continuing processes of literary canonization and marginalization. For science fiction has been one major bone of

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Science Fiction, Canonization, Marginalization

contention in academic arguments over the canon, has carried on its own internal arguments regarding the canon of science fiction, and has faced the special challenge of forces beyond academia which create and champion their own canons. First, of all forms of once-neglected literature that now receive significant scholarly attention, science fiction has attracted and continues to attract the most academic resistance. While several major authors, ranging from Mary Shelley and H. G. Wells to Margaret Atwood and William Gibson, have won approval in the academy, popular science fiction otherwise attracts reflexive disdain, and to this day some departments of literature may forbid graduate students to write dissertations on science fiction, refuse to offer science fiction classes, and chastise or punish faculty members who publish on science fiction. Because the old complaint that science fiction is "second-rate literature" is no longer valid, given the numbers of unquestionably literate writers who have joined the field, there must be other explanations for this ongoing hostility to science fiction from the Old Guard, and many Young Turks as well, in the literary wars. Perhaps, as some commentators here will suggest, there is a foundational quality in science fiction that represents a threat to literary traditions. Second, within the field of science fiction criticism, there are debates about the canon of science fiction that run parallel to larger disputes about the canon of literature. Some prefer to focus attention on a few writers of undeniable talents, like Philip K. Dick, Stanislaw Lem, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Gibson, but others have publicly protested about overattention to these writers and have called for more study of "neglected" authors. There are arguments about where science fiction studies should be centered: English departments and comparative literature departments compete for dominance, while a few argue for history or sociology. Whenever anthologies like Le Guin and Brian Attebery's The Norton Book of Science Fiction attempt to epitomize the field, they meet with both widespread approval and vehement denunciations. In sum, while science fiction scholars are united by a willingness to defend their literature against criticism from outside, they are deeply divided on almost all other issues raised by its study. Finally, in attempting to exert control over the study of science fiction, academic scholars face a uniquely challenging situation. In other fields of literature, once the texts escape from the powerful but impermanent control of public opinion and mass-market publishers, they fall entirely under the jurisdiction of literary scholars; the novelists from the 1920s still in print and still discussed today are almost entirely those who have been approved by academic authorities. Yet science fiction is subject to another strong influence: the industrious science fiction community consisting of dedicated readers who embody and maintain the traditions of the genre, carry on their own painstaking research, and express their own views concerning the quality and stature of its authors. Thus, while science fiction writers from the 1920s like Edgar Rice Burroughs and E. E. "Doc" Smith receive little or no attention from university-trained scholars, their names remain alive in new editions and ongoing commentaries because members of the science fiction community persist in valuing their work. There are conflicting opinions about this

Westfahl: Introduction

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genre-based authority: some praise what they see as its focus and enthusiasm, while others condemn what they see as its parochial vision and conservatism. To address the issues involving science fiction, canonization, marginalization, and the academy, this volume assembles a diverse range of commentators, including a number of people who have been actively involved in processes of canonization and marginalization: three editors of periodicals focused on science fiction criticism and commentary—Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction, Science Fiction Studies, and Science Fiction Eye; the editor of The Oxford Book of Science Fiction Stories and The Oxford Book of Fantasy Stories; the editors of the forthcoming The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, the general editor of The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism; three editors or co-editors of critical anthologies; and two published novelists. In addition, six contributors have published full-length critical studies of science fiction or related genres. With young scholars also providing their input, this volume represents the collective judgment of both those who have endeavored to control science fiction and those who have felt the influence of their endeavors. The first part, "Overviews: Science Fiction and the Academy," broadly examines science fiction as viewed from various perspectives in the academy. Tom Shippey offers "Literary Gatekeepers and the Fabril Tradition," where he discusses the reasons why academic critics are so often discomfited by science fiction. The late Frank McConnell's "Seven Types of Chopped Liver: My Adventures in the Genre Wars" argues, from the perspective of science fiction, against the very notion of genre itself and finds in much literary criticism an unhealthy rejection of the very impulses that lead us to enjoy literature. Susan Kray's "The Things Women Don't Say" examines the self-imposed restrictions of feminist science fiction writers and scholars as they project a surprisingly narrow range of attitudes, in contrast to the more expansive and liberating viewpoints found in romance novels and fan fiction. And Jonathan Langford's "Why the Academy Is Afraid of Dragons: The Suppression of the Marvelous in Theories of the Fantastic" complains about "fashionable" critical approaches that marginalize science fiction's increasingly important sister genre, fantasy. The second part, "Mechanisms of Canonization," considers the various ways that different groups attempt to shape the canon of science fiction, including awards, anthologies, and critical commentaries. Edward James's "The Arthur C. Clarke Award and Its Reception in Britain" examines how one major science fiction award has generated ongoing controversy in its brief existence. Joseph D. Miller's "Popes or Tropes: Defining the Grails of Science Fiction" criticizes The Norton Book of Science Fiction, sometimes regarded as the standard text for introductory classes, for offering an unrepresentative definition of the field and argues that the genre of science fiction in effect fruitfully defines itself by the characteristic attitudes and tropes observed in its texts and expected by readers. Regarding the influence of fans and readers as less benign, Stephen P. Brown's "Science Fiction Eye and the Rebellion against Recursion" sees the genre of science fiction as a stultifying force, as "literary tropes become reflected in decayed form," and describes his efforts to

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revitalize science fiction from within. Finally, Arthur B. Evans's "Authorities, Canons, and Scholarship: The Role of Academic Journals" draws upon the author's years of experience as editor of Science Fiction Studies to explore how such journals influence science fiction and science fiction criticism. The third part, "Case Studies in Marginalization," explores why certain texts become marginalized or project the attitude of a marginalized tradition. George Slusser's "Multiculturalism and the Cultural Dynamics of Classic American Science Fiction" employs classic stories by Robert A. Heinlein and Bruce Sterling to explore why the newest and most fashionable of literary scholars may be hostile to science fiction, since it simultaneously reflects and challenges their ideology. Turning to the pulp magazines of the 1930s, Farah Mendlesohn's "Science Fiction in the Academies of History and Literature; Or, History and the Use of Science Fiction" demonstrates how historians can obtain valuable insights from the sorts of science fiction texts traditionally regarded as uncanonical by literary critics. Elyce Rae Helford's "(E)raced Visions: Women of Color and Science Fiction in the United States" analyzes the restrictions imposed on two writers, Octavia E. Butler and Misha, who find themselves doubly marginalized as both women and racial minorities. Considering the effects of genres bordering on science fiction, Howard V. Hendrix's "Hard Magic, Soft Science: The Marginalization of Kevin J. Anderson and Doug Beason's Assemblers of Infinity and Bruce Boston's Stained Glass Rain' examines what happens when authors such as Anderson, Beason, and Boston try to move away from science fiction into "mainstream" or "literary" fiction and typically encounter resistance from previous allies within the genre. To close the volume, Joseph Childers, Townsend Carr, and Regna Meenk's "White Men Can't . . . : (De)centering Authority and Jacking into Phallic Economies in William Gibson's Count Zero" employs the theories of Jean Baudrillard to discover in a paradigmatic novel the characteristic stance of cyberpunk literature as a celebration of marginalized persons and texts. Considered as a whole, this rich volume will illuminate a number of issues involving science fiction, canonization, marginalization, and the academy, as science fiction scholars argue against other literary scholars, argue amongst themselves, and argue against voices from outside academia. And by doing so, this volume will also help to bring into focus the problematic issues of empowerment and disempowerment that now arise in all areas of contemporary culture.

Parti Overviews: Science Fiction and the Academy


Chapter 2

Literary Gatekeepers and the Fabril Tradition Tom Shippey

All of us who work with science fiction, I am sure, have a store of insults to record from those in authority. Perhaps the award for the crassest example should go to Sheila Finch's senior colleague, who said to her after she published her first science fiction work, "I hope your next book is a real novel." Although that was remarkable for both its brevity and its dismissiveness, it remains in a sense typical. All of us past a certain age have not only heard but have gotten used to hearing similar statements. Despite their frequency, I suggest that, if they were mere random and individual examples of thoughtlessness or rudeness, the right tactic would be to tolerate and as far as possible ignore them. But I do not think that is the case. It seems to me that the open hostility to science fiction often seen in academic departments of literature has a common and even a compulsive root. By facing this, we will be in a position to learn something about "canonization and marginalization," both within and beyond our field. I have suggested elsewhere1 that these negative reactions can be used diagnostically. My starting point (again taken from personal experience) was that I had often been told by literary colleagues, seemingly without awareness of selfcontradiction, that (a) they hated science fiction, and (b) they never read it. I suggested that regardless of the contradiction, these two statements were probably often true, and that they offered us a kind of generic indicator. I went on to propose (agreeing with Darko Suvin2) that science fiction depends on the novum, which (now expanding on Suvin) I oppose to the datum: the latter is definable as one piece of that shared body of information which all readers need in order to read any text at all; the former the bit of new information which you must find within a text in order to read it as a science fiction text—a bit which is by definition initially not shared, which the reader has to be told. This view of the novum is not exactly that of Suvin,3 but is meanwhile by no means hostile or contradictory to the view of John Huntington, who has argued that science fiction (he cites H. G. Wells and William Gibson) is marked by a new habitus, a new class-awareness, "the introduction of new class or group values into the hegemonic canon."4 My suggestion is, in brief,

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that it is possible to reconcile the contradiction of hating without reading by assuming that it is the presence of the novum that marks a work as science fiction; but that as soon as some readers recognize a novum, they immediately stop reading—recognizing in the very existence of a novum an implicit challenge to the old habitus, as to "the hegemonic canon."5 Both Huntington and I say in effect that science fiction depends on novelty, and that this novelty is seen as a threat (rightly, for it is a threat) by conservative groups including academic groups. A further way of putting this is to say that during my science fiction "lifetime" (1958 to now) being a science fiction reader has been rather like being gay. In both cases, one could say, drawing out the similarities: • • • • •

there was definite pressure, especially in the 1950s and 1960s, not to admit the fact; there were social penalties if you did; you got used to hiding the fact; but there were places where you could meet others of the same persuasion; and there was very strong "networking" among the concealed in-group, whether of science fiction readers or of homosexuals; • in both cases, too, discrimination was illegal, was frowned on theoretically, and people would deny they were doing it, but they did it just the same; • finally, it was possible to "come out" and get away with it, but only when you reached a certain level of seniority.

Nevertheless, we have to recognize in both cases that the social climate has changed since the late 1950s. We now have "Gay Studies" in colleges, as we do "Science Fiction Studies." Further, I said that science fiction depends on a shocking or threatening novelty, and one must admit that modern academia is fascinated by novelty. It has become part of the collective myth or self-image of academic critics, especially practitioners of "literary theory." Almost all fields, including some of the staidest, have felt the need to develop at least a rhetoric of novelty, so that we have for instance "the new medievalism," "the new historicism," "the new philology."6 "Boring old" is regularly opposed as a trope to "brilliant young" or "exciting new." So why should we, as science fiction critics, not put the past behind us? Trade on the inherent novelty of our field? Assume that the revulsion from the novum will in the future be professionally unacceptable instead of just personally rude? And make a bid for power, or at least some authority, within the power-structures of our profession—such as the Modern Language Association (MLA)? The brief answer is that for all the talk about widening canonicity, I suspect that while a place is now being made for science fiction within the MLA, it will be a subordinate or ancillary place. Major theorists are not theorizing about science fiction (with the exception of Fredric Jameson and a few others). More normal is the point of view expressed in Howard Felperin's interesting critique of literary theory, Beyond Deconstruction, which closes with the words: "the virtual focus of our changing critical discourse will be the great classic texts, which continue to repay so richly each historical construction and deconstruction they attract."7 The discourse may change, but the classical texts will not. One can hardly avoid

Shippey: Literary Gatekeepers

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remarking, plus ca change, plus c'est—plus ca sera—la meme chose. Science fiction may have "come out of the closet," to return to my analogy, but it has not gotten into the cocktail party. The image I have of our field within literary studies is that of the outsider on the edge of the group, allowed to listen, not excluded, but still not part of the conversation. Is there a reason for the continuing exclusion, to explain why there is no "new science fiction-ism" to go with the other "new-isms"; why we don't say postrealist along with postmodernist, poststructuralist, postfeminist, postcolonialist (etc.)? I think there is indeed one, which I find I can sum up best by Edmund Spenser's lines about the Garden of Adonis in The Faerie Queene: For in the wide wombe of the world there lyes, In hateful 1 darkenesse and in deepe horrore, An huge eternall Chaos, which supplyes The substances of natures fruitfull progenyes.8 In my figure here, the "deepe horrore" is that with which science fiction is often regarded, a horror stemming from subliminal awareness of the "eternall Chaos" created by the unlimited changes of novum and habitus. But this horror sadly fails to observe the "fruitfull progenyes" which spring from that chaos. I wish to illustrate what I have said so far by examining what I suggest is a critical moment in the origins of science fiction. I am aware that various people offer various moments for "the birth of science fiction," and I do not mean to reject all the others. I am aware also that the one I propose to examine is not even chronologically the first, while it even refers within itself (in a way) to one of the other candidates, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, so strongly put forward by Brian Aldiss as the originating work of science fiction.9 But my candidate, I feel, has paradigmatic power in this context, that is, in a discussion of "canonization and marginalization." It is Wells's The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896). If one reads this, I think it is possible to see why the MLA and the academic literary community remain wary of science fiction. The scenario of Moreau, far from being new, is of course taken from what may be the oldest text in Western literature, Homer's Odyssey, specifically Book X, the adventure of the Island of Circe, the witch who turns men into swine, "hogs who rut and slumber on the earth."10 Wells's Prendick is a doublet of Homer's Odysseus; Wells's Moreau is the transforming Circe; the Beast-Folk are Odysseus's crew. The parallel is quite consciously present within Wells's text itself. After he has been rescued from shipwreck by the Ipecacuanha, and from the Ipecacuanha by Moreau, Prendick finds himself on Moreau's island with nothing to do and little to read. There is nothing in his hut except "surgical works and editions of the Latin and Greek classics (languages I cannot read with any comfort)."11 The "surgical works" make sense here as a reminder, or warning, of Moreau's profession, but the classics seem both inexplicable and redundant: Robert Philmus, in his excellent variorum edition of Wells's work, suggests that they can be regarded as "a piece of [Wellsian] autobiography," while later on he sees the "crib of Horace" (24) that Prendick

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throws aside as symbolizing "the epitome of Civilized Restraint."12 Yet Prendick throws aside more than Horace, and more than civilized restraint. In Chapter 11 he refers directly to an English classical text which reports the Circe myth. Thinking that Moreau is operating on men and turning them into beasts, Prendick sees it as a fate worse than death to be sent off, "a lost soul, a beast, to the rest of their Comus rout" (33). Comus is the villainous magician of Milton's masque of 1637, introduced there as the son of Homer's Circe, and following the same bestializing practices: Circe and Comus are the classical images, the classical scenario, that give the background setting, the "horizon of expectation" for Moreau. But of course the classical images in Moreau turn out to be wrong. Prendick is entirely mistaken. Moreau is not changing men into beasts, he is changing beasts into men. The vital question is, which is worse? A critical scene is in Chapter 13, "A Parley." Prendick, who has run away, has been hunted down by Moreau and Montgomery and is standing on the shore, ready to throw himself to the sharks rather than surrender to be transformed as he expects. The Beast-Folk, the products of Moreau's experiments, are standing behind Moreau and Montgomery, listening. Moreau has to reassure Prendick without them learning the truth—so he uses the language of the classics: "He coughed, thought, then shouted: 'Latin, Prendick! bad Latin, schoolboy Latin; but try and understand. Hi non sunt homines; sunt animalia qui nos habemus—vivisected. A humanising process. I will explain. Come ashore'." (43). Prendick at first rejects this, but then is reassured and comes ashore. There are however two points to make about this scene. First there is something terribly degraded about Moreau's Latin: "qui nos habemus—vivisected." Qui is intended as a relative pronoun, but animal is neuter, and the relative pronoun must here be accusative plural, object of "habemus— vivisected": quae, therefore, not qui. "Habemus—vivisected," meanwhile, must be an attempt at translating the English perfect "have vivisected" into Latin. But Latin does not make a perfect with an auxiliary verb. One might expect, then, from the English form of "vivisect," some such verb as vivisectavimus. However the English infinitive is derived in this case from the past participle, and the Latin verb's "principal parts" in fact go "seco-secare-secui-sectum." Since Latin also conveys person and number by verb ending, the pronoun nos is furthermore redundant. What Moreau should have said is "Sunt animalia quae vivisecuimus." To make these points is of course in one way an act of utter pedantry (reminiscent of John Cleese as the Roman centurion in the film The Life of Brian). However, and more seriously, I would lay stress on the shocking and even insulting character of Moreau's errors. In my time, and in Wells's, saying something like that in a real school would have been a beating offence—because Latin, in 1890s Britain, Europe, and also to a large extent America, was a mark of the literary and the ruling caste; still at least 90% gender-related; and taught entirely sub virga, under the rod. What Moreau speaks, however, is a "pidgin," a variant of Latin resembling the debased forms of European languages spread around the world largely by the slave trade. It hardly makes sense for Moreau to speak this pidgin. Presumably the Latin classics which Prendick cannot read belonged to Moreau, in


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which case he ought to be well above this stage, even if he is perhaps "condescending" to Prendick's level in the critical "parley." But I would suggest that we do not need here to work out complex explanations to do with Wells's autobiography or Moreau's linguistic awareness.13 What the scene does with great force is express powerful contempt for a whole classical tradition of both language and literature. Prendick is, I repeat, just plain wrong in recalling his images of Circe and Comus: his literary knowledge is here useless and dangerous to him. Since that whole classical tradition is wrong, it is only appropriate that the major European vehicle of it, the Latin language, should be scornfully debased here into a mere utilitarian pidgin. The horror any classically educated person would have been educated to feel about Moreau's grammatical mistakes is in Wells's story simply overridden. The important thing in what Moreau says is content, not grammar or style. The second, more important point about the scene is that this contempt is seriously meant. It is not just the classical images that are wrong, not just Prendick who is wrong; the classical texts are wrong too, and their authors and most of all their readers. They thought the worst thing that could happen was to turn men into beasts. That would certainly be bad for the men, like Odysseus's crew, who are so turned. But what if beasts are turned into men? What are the implications of that? What would that say about people as a whole—including the ones who don't get turned? Such a transformation, never imagined in any classical text, would say there is no essential difference between people and beasts: people in fact are beasts, mere human animals, the dividing line accepted by all from Homer's time to Wells's becoming simply irrelevant. As we all realize, Wells in a sense means exactly that. And my phrase "in a sense" contains much of the definition, and the alienation, of science fiction. The Island of Doctor Moreau is clearly a post-Darwinian story,14 and one major implication of The Origin of Species is indeed that there is no uncrossable boundary between species in their origins. Beasts (as humans call them) evolved into people; all Moreau is doing, then, is accelerating that process. Furthermore the process Wells imagined in the story was not in his view impossible. In prolonged correspondence after the book came out15 Wells defended the scientific aspects of his story as accurate and plausible within the knowledge of his time. What he was saying was that his readers had been reading science, but not in a sense fiction—a continuing claim of science fiction. The contrast with all previous literature deserves to be stressed. Previous literature, like Homer or Milton, was indeed fiction, if not mere folk-tale. Its premises were false, its readers misinformed by authors who wrote as they did because they knew no better. The deliberately contemptuous and contradictory nature of Wells's attacks on literary tradition comes out elsewhere in the many ironies of the Time Traveller's visit to the library in South Kensington with "decaying vestiges of books," which he leaves to search for more "useful discoveries";16 and in Moreau, Wells's aggression towards the past is also seen in frequent and deliberate religious blasphemies—the Beast-Folk with their parodistic

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"litany of the Law" (40), the ritual prohibitions imposed on them, Moreau's unexplained urge to make beasts in his own image, and Prendick's invention of supernatural religion once Moreau is dead: "Children of the Law," I said, "he is not dead! ... He has changed his shape; he has changed his body . . . . For a time you will not see him. He is—there," I pointed upward, "where he can watch you. You cannot see him, but he can see you. Fear the Law." I looked at them squarely. They flinched. "He is great, he is good," said the Ape-Man, peering fearfully upward among the dense trees. (68) This blasphemous element indeed caused far more indignation at the time of first publication than any mere reworking of Homer. But to keep attention on the literary caste, not the religious caste, I will indicate just one more assault on literary tradition, or literary blasphemy, which occurs at the end of the book. The ending of Moreau is clearly calqued on the end of Gulliver's Travels, where Gulliver, returned from the land of the Houyhnhnms, sees the whole human race as Yahoos and ends up "not altogether out of hopes in some time to suffer a neighbour Yahoo in my company, without the apprehensions I am yet under of his teeth or his claws."17 Similarly Prendick in London sees the Beast-Folk everywhere: "I would go out into the streets to fight with my delusion, and prowling women would mew after me . . . . Then I would turn aside into some chapel—and even there, such was my disturbance, it seemed that the preacher gibbered 'Big Thinks,' even as the Ape-man had done; or into some library, and there the intent faces over the books seemed but patient creatures waiting for prey" (87). Now the absolute staple of Swift studies for decades has been to remind us that Gulliver at the end of Book IV is mad, so we do not need to take his disturbing vision seriously; we can "de-literalize" it (that is, literarize it) by muttering "dramatic irony."181 confess that I was always doubtful about this literary strategy, even in my youth (though having the "gay" habits of a science fiction reader I knew better than to say so). But the reason I was doubtful about Swift was that I had read Moreau: and I knew that Wells, or Prendick, whichever one prefers—in science fiction tradition there is no disgrace in characters serving as authorial mouthpieces—meant his final vision seriously. People were in a sense beasts, and once Prendick stopped saying that (which might have been ironic), Wells went on with his postscripts and arguments about Moreau, which definitely were not ironic. To sum up, my argument so far has been a double one. On the one hand I suggest that there is a deliberate attack on linguistic and literary tradition in The Island of Doctor Moreau, which forms in fact the novel's hinge.19 Classical literary tradition is condemned as not only untrue, but the actual reverse of the truth, while classical linguistic knowledge is even more contemptuously dismissed as being of mere marginal utility. Meanwhile the authority of these traditions is replaced by a deliberate argumentative appeal to scientific truth, an appeal which science fiction still continues to make, though we have not as yet been able to frame a convincing literary way of discussing it.20


13

I turn now to more general questions of "canonization and marginalization" raised by Moreau, and note that these exist on three levels. They are what prevent Moreau from becoming a "great classic text," in Felperin's terms. I will list them in ascending order of current theoretical unacceptability. One, already discussed, is its dismissive attitude towards previous authors. Moreau keeps saying, in effect, "these authors—Homer, Milton, Swift—they have no authority. They were wrong. As for the 'anxiety of influence'—what's that? I'll take these classic texts, as I take the components of their classic language, and reform them without concern for their ruling structures. I'll make a literary 'pidgin' out of them." Aggressive indeed! But I think our current literary caste, the contemporary "gatekeepers" of interpretative tradition, might be able to cope with that. As I said, they have a rhetoric of "challenge," "disturbance," "novelty," and "parricide." While not always practiced as wholeheartedly as it is preached, the rhetoric is at least there to be appealed to. Much more seriously unacceptable is a challenge to established authority in Moreau on a second level. I will record here as a piece of evidence that I never noticed this particular challenge until my very last reading of the text, while it has also as far as I can tell escaped any comment from others. The reason for my blindness is overfamiliarity: this aspect of Moreau is written, to use Huntington's term, from my ancestral habitus. The reason for American critics' silence, I suspect, lies conversely in reluctance or alienation. But the fact is that Moreau follows a once-familiar imperialist paradigm, the story about gaining power through prowess and losing it by human weakness. Like the Circe story, this is an "island" tradition, but its definitive works include The Tempest, Robinson Crusoe, Lord of the Flies, and a host of other "boys' books" now forgotten. However the model for this aspect of Moreau is probably Rudyard Kipling's story "The Man Who Would Be King" (1888). Wells's admiration for this is on record, expressed with odd gratuitousness (like his disregard for Moreau's Greek and Latin classics) in Chapter 7 of When the Sleeper Wakes. Here the Sleeper comes upon some puzzling cylinders in the future world he has woken into. After a while he realizes that they are labelled in phonetic script, and puzzles out the title of one of them, "The Man Who Would Be King," a story he recalls vividly as "one of the best stories in the world."21 Kipling tells the tale of two Europeans who decide to conquer their own country with rifles, discipline, and Freemasonry. They at first succeed, but fail in the end when one of them is bitten by a girl and bleeds, showing the natives of the country that they are only men, not gods. The tale is closely followed in Moreau, with Moreau and Montgomery obviously posing as gods to the Beast-Folk and anxious above all not to let them taste blood. Both works are parables of imperialism: Moreau may wish to break down the separation between man and beast, but he has every intention of maintaining the separation between rulers and ruled. This imperial tradition became increasingly unacceptable during the twentieth century,22 but one cannot deny that this tradition knew a great deal about empowerment and disempowerment. Prendick figures within this tradition simply as a failure. Once Moreau and Montgomery are dead, and only he is left, he tries to

14Scien Ficton,Canoizaton,Marginalztion


take up the imperialist role. He sees the Hyena-Swine and knows "His continued life was . . . a threat against mine." Under the imperialist code, he must act at once ("Any decision is better than no decision"), and Prendick knows that much at least: I was perhaps a dozen seconds collecting myself. Then I cried, "Salute! Bow down!" His teeth flashed upon me in a snarl. "Who are yow that I should—" (76) And Prendick shoots, but misses. Prendick is a poor imperialist. He knows some of the rules—all of them carefully taught in the literature, or subliterature, of Wells's time and my own: never show fear; never hesitate; never give an order that will not be obeyed; instantly punish disobedience; a wrong decision is better than indecision; and so on. But he fails to put them into practice. His boast near the end of the story, in chapter 21, "that I held something like a pre-eminence among them" (80), is only an indication of his failure. A true imperialist is not supposed to be primus inter pares, preeminent among equals; he is supposed to impose himself as completely different in kind. The point is that, in this particular challenge to authority, Wells's text asks its readers insistently to take the side of the imperialists, and to note Prendick's failure to live up to that role as simply a failure. This is now totally unacceptable to modern literary culture, perhaps to political culture also. Is it possible to say that these are merely contemporary stereotypes from 1896, having nothing at all to do with modern science fiction? It may be so. Yet one may also reflect on the American imperialist, or American colonialist, rhetoric of Robert A. Heinlein; 23 the space empires of Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle; the sympathy with failing empires in Poul Anderson's "Flandry" series; and a dozen other prominent examples to conclude that there may indeed be something in the ideology or mindset of traditional science fiction that is not as out of touch with the Kipling/Wells tradition as is most of modern literary culture. If that were to be the case, it would explain a great deal of subliminal critical hostility. However it is a third and least easily defined level of challenge to authority that has done the most to keep texts like Moreau out of the "hegemonic canon." This may be approached by reference to Stephen Greenblatt's landmark of "New Historicism," Renaissance Self-Fashioning. In this he asserts a number of propositions about his classic Renaissance texts and authors: • they are all middle-class rather than aristocratic; • for such figures, self-fashioning "involves submission to an absolute power or authority situated at least partially outside the self—God, Bible, court, colonial or military administration; • "self-fashioning is achieved in relation to something perceived as alien, strange, or hostile"; • the alien is chaotic or demonic, it always resurges, violence used against it turns against the self, etc.24 My immediate reaction was to think how easily these remarks, mutatis

mutandis,


15

apply to Wells: lower-class rather than middle-class, self-defining in relation to such aliens as Beast-Folk or Martians, aware of the rebounding effect of violence (as in the fight of the Thunder Child against the Martian war machines in The War of the Worlds chapter), and so on. But the problem, the real problem for science fiction in challenging literary authority, lies in the second item. Greenblatt clearly feels he can rise superior to the authority images of his Renaissance texts because they are no longer authorities. God, the Bible, the court, colonial or military administration: these authorities in modern literary culture are either deposed, objects of ridicule, or in doubt. Wells's "absolute power or authority," however, is science, exemplified in particular by Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley, Wells's tutor, and Prendick's, and Moreau's. These authority figures, and even more the source of their authority, have not been deposed. It is impossible for literary critics to apply their rhetoric of control and condescension to them with any conviction. I return to the thought of "deepe horrore" and "huge eternall Chaos." If there is one thing which characterizes all schools of modern literary theory, it is their denial of objectivity, and their insistence on chaos. We have: self-referentiality, the text as a purely linguistic construct, the failure of linguistics as a model, human beings as cultural artifacts, literary discourse resting on historical discourse which rests on mythic discourse ("turtles all the way down," as has been said), the aporia, the scandal, the mise-en-abime, the whole deconstruction movement, and all the rest of it. To quote the Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, not for its preeminence but for its deliberate centrality: "If language, metaphor, and consciousness really are structured by difference, then there can be no solid foundation, no fixed point of reference, no authority or certainty, either ontological or interpretive."25 Such views have become entirely characteristic of the authority structure of the critical profession, which we may label for short as the MLA. They are impossible to reconcile with the claims for truth-to-fact of much science fiction, and all serious science. This is the last and I feel the most insuperable of the obstacles preventing Moreau, and science fiction with it, from being accepted into the central and authoritative core of literary culture. The deepest horror which such works now create, deeper than that coming from rejection of tradition or acceptance of authority-by-power, stems from their perceived obedience to an authority outside "the text." It may be that this does not matter. We can easily recognize (even if we are reluctant to admit) that the views of the MLA cut absolutely no ice outside the MLA. Literary discourse has become ludicrously different from scientific discourse, which is still overwhelmingly characterized by: • a denotative linguistic system, parodied in Swift's Laputabut now in practice, including but not confined to mathematics; • rigorous training in that system, which is now worldwide; • built-in "upgrade capacity" for the system, so change is a permanent contingency but does not affect the hegemonic structure; • a uniquely coherent interpretive community.

16


This does not of course mean that there are no disagreements in science, such as that regarding "cold fusion," the controversy about the HIV theory of AIDS, the struggles of the DNA discoverers to get a hearing, and so on. I am, however, saying that those disagreements take place within a frame accepted by all disputants as objective. The reaction of those literary critics who notice this at all is often mere denial. Felperin declares in a note that "it is difficult to argue that alchemy, for example, does not have exactly the same epistemological status as chemistry, however surprising such a view might be to a professional chemist engaged in research." Doesn't chemistry, unlike alchemy, "work," one might naively inquire? No, Felperin replies, for "Alchemists and chemists desire and expect different kinds of results from their activity, and would thus mutually deny the effectiveness of each other's practice" (87-88). The decision as to whether something "works" or not is in short "culturally relative." This is not the impression I get of medieval alchemists from the alchemist in Chaucer's "Canon's Yeoman's Tale," who seems passionately to want his science to work in precisely a modern way. But the denial of objectivity, even in science, seems now to be compulsive within the literary field, within the belief structure of the MLA— among the gatekeepers.26 If I am correct in what I have said, then the gap between the "two cultures" of humanities and sciences is here total.27 One might look at the elaborate apparatus for noncommitment of modern critical writing—the inverted commas, the parentheses, the slash marks, the spelling changes, the placing of items sous rature, "under erasure," so they can be read/not-read at the same time. Against that a paradigmatic image is that of the dying Richard Feynman putting the piece of space shuttle gasket in his glass of ice water before the TV cameras and saying, "nature is not fooled."28 He meant that observers, human opinions, bureaucratic procedures, all had no value. If you ignored the nature of the material, it would fail, the shuttle would crash, and its crew would die. When he said that, Feynman was repeating an old theme of science fiction.29 But I would add that while it was of course tragic that scientific administrators had so readily gone over to the alternative, nonscientific habits of "public relations" and "relative values," it has perhaps been even more tragic that politicians and scientific administrators in this past century have had to cope with ethical questions without the assistance of any powerful literary or ethical tradition, that tradition having disqualified itself in their eyes by its outdatedness and lack of realism. One may well think of Harry Truman having to cope with the Bomb with habits of mind derived, as H. Bruce Franklin has shown, not from literature or philosophy but from early science fiction and The Saturday Evening Post.30 The urgent question is, not whether the literary profession can somehow succeed in putting science and science fiction back in its (subordinate) place, but whether the literary profession can, perhaps with a lead from science fiction, succeed in regaining any of the authority which it has, in the wider world outside its own structures, largely lost. The omens are not good. I note among other things Gregory Benford's uncompromising remark that "the most penetrating way to view science fiction [let alone the wider issues that I have raised] has not yet been evolved."31 Yet a review


17

of recent history may offer one way forward. There was a time, perhaps twenty-five years ago, when literary studies were heading in the direction of deconstruction or the mise-en-abime, but had an ambition to become strictly scientific. The great hope was to apply the quasi-anthropological methods devised to work on preliterate cultures, and to adapt them for cultures of full literacy: to move, one might say, from Propp's Morphology of the Folk-Tale to Todorov's Grammaire du Decameron and on to a syntaxe litteraire}1 Roland Barthes looks back on this period as le reve euphorique de scientificite}3 and it is of course quite a common theme in science fiction too: to have a hard social science which can look at a culture, transcribe the culture into some universally agreed mathematics, and then say what is going to happen! You may remember the scene at the start of Isaac Asimov's Foundation, when Hari Seldon, founder of "psychohistory," passes the slide rule to his acolyte and tells him to work out the equations for himself. Well, slide rules have gone, but we still have no psychohistory; likewise no syntaxe litteraire; and as for le reve euphorique de scientificite, how are we to translate it: "the euphoric dream of. . . Scientology"? It could be said that if you try and turn science fiction into social reality, you end up with L. Ron Hubbard. Not an encouraging image. Nevertheless I think we can find a more positive self-image; some points of encouragement; and a more positive critical strategy, which I will outline briefly. For a better self-image, I think we need some new terms. One I am happy with is "fabril literature."34 Fabril is easily defined. It is the dark, alien, Other of pastoral. • Pastoral has been with us as a literary mode since at least the time of Theocritus. So has fabril, I believe, but it has not been named or recognized. • Pastoral is about people, in a state of nature, with animals and plants. Fabril is largely about made things, artifacts. • Pastoral is of course based on the pastor, the "good shepherd," fabril on the faber, the maker: often the blacksmith, the metal-beater, but also the Moreau, the manipulator of biology and even of society. It is remarkable how homo faber has been written out of history, even literary history. What was Jesus's father's trade? By well-established tradition we believe he was a carpenter; old iconic irony shows him in his workshop making a cross. Nevertheless in the Latin Bible he is described as a faber, and in the Greek as a teknon. The common meaning of the Latin word at least is "blacksmith," while the Old English New Testament (written by men remote from the Mediterranean world of literary culture) quite correctly translated the word as wyrhta, that is to say, a "wright." Woodwright, cartwright, shipwright, wainwright—even playwright—a wright is someone who works things. There is a strange suitability in the fact that the pioneers of flight were named Wright, as if technophilia lurked in their genes. One could even translate wyrhta, like faber, as "engineer." How striking that this has been totally censored out of our official cultural myth, so that Joseph has to be a carpenter! The underlying opposition seems to be: wood/natural/pastoral/good: metal/artificial/fabril/bad. The prejudice which Joseph's carpentry embodies

18


extends also to a systematic downrating of many aspects of science fiction, not least its continued and collective attempt to raise the status of the wright, the engineer, or the faber. As so often happens, Wells seems to have written the "paradigm story" for "fabril man," his 1903 tale "The Land Ironclads," which for that reason alone I selected as the lead story in The Oxford Book of Science Fiction Stories. Wells here opposes two nations at war: one a hardy and pastoral breed, the other a race of townsmen. At the start of the story the former group seem to be well in command of the trench warfare that has (prophetically) begun: they are tougher, more cunning, better shots, full of imperial virtues. The war correspondent on whom the story centers notes the ugly, cunning, arrogant, masculine face of one of them and thinks it typical. Then the "land ironclads" appear, a prophetic vision (details apart) of the coming of the tank thirteen years later. With a predictable irony, the war correspondent, the nearest we get in the story to a "literary man," immediately changes sympathies as he sees the hardy pastoralists brushed aside, and contemplates a piece to be titled "Manhood versus Machinery." What he fails to notice, but what Wells leaves as his final word and focus, is that: "the half-dozen comparatively slender young men in blue pyjamas, who were standing about their victorious land ironclad, drinking coffee and eating biscuits, had also in their eyes and carriage something not altogether degraded below the level of a man" (21). Wells's young tank commanders, in brief, provide an image of "fabril man," which one should note is deliberately unheroic, even unmilitary: the urbanists have been forced into war, but decline to take up its traditions, preferring to see it merely as another job to be done. It is striking that Wells should have realized as early as 1903 not only the technical possibilities of trench warfare and armored vehicles, but also the immediate sentimental reaction against "fabrilism" of the traditional writer, so marked ever since. The story which I chose to set against Wells's as the last item in the Oxford collection was David Brin's "Piecework," from Interzone in 1992. This has in most obvious ways no resemblance to Wells's at all. It is femaleoriented rather than male. It contains no elements of war, or metalwork, or smithcraft. It has a strong mythic strand. Yet it seems to me in a deeper way to help to define the idea of the "fabril." In Brin's story, two women, Io and Perseph, are in the business of renting out their wombs to produce—if they are unskillful, like Perseph—organic industrial materials or—if they are skilful, like Io—creatures not unlike the Beast-Folk, but sentient, with human genes and superhuman powers, capable even of citizenship. The activity of womb-renting of course seems deeply inhuman, and Brin suggests at the start of his story that the two women are in a way in a kind of Hell: Persephone is of course in some myths the queen of Hades. Io, however, is in Greek myth one of the loves of Jupiter, turned into a heifer by his jealous wife Juno: among lo's animal womb-competitors are the "fabricows." The point about the Io myth, however, is that in it she regained her true shape, whereas in Brin's story the heroine Io, evading the plots of her jealous friend, eventually gains the final admission of human status in her world—permission to bear a human child. What this story shares with Wells's is the assertion that true humanity resides


19

not in following traditional patterns, but in having the skill and character to dominate a new technology: a physical one in Wells, a biological one in Brin, in each case rejected by one side or character, and embraced and used by the other. Both authors also feint cunningly at the reader's expectations, making it seem as if sympathy should go to the traditional side and playing up the horrific aspects of the new technology, before insisting finally that all technologies remain in the hands of their creators, if'the creators (unlike Dr. Frankenstein)35 have the will to use them. Both authors seem to know, in fact, that readers will not like their central characters, for one reason or another! This trait is taken to a further extreme in a story included near the middle of my anthology, Larry Niven's "Cloak of Anarchy," from 1972. The story here need not concern us. It is enough to say that its image of homo faber, an especially clear and detailed one, is also a clear description of what is now called a "nerd." Ron Cole is "an artist and an inventor"; he cannot however remember anyone's name: Ron Cole had better things to think about than what name belonged with whom. A name was only a tag and a conversational gambit... A signal. Ron had developed a substitute. Into a momentary gap in the conversation he would say, "Look at this," and hold out— miracles. (403-4) He works, in fact, with things rather than people. The story shows him to be irresponsible, stubborn, poor at understanding people, bad at politics—not, however, necessarily wrong. He offers yet another thoughtful image of "fabril man," in which as usual the reader is given the chance of rejecting him in favor of more normal images of humanity but also invited to consider whether, as with Wells's "slender young men" or Brin's Io, he does not also have something in him that ought to be part of a balanced human whole. My main point here, however, is not to suggest that science fiction should be seen as a branch of "fabril literature" and interpreted solely in that light. I do mean to suggest that the literary terminology we have inherited from antiquity is inadequate, and that we should not hesitate to create our own, perhaps especially if that terminology can be seen not just as untraditional but as antitraditional. I mean to suggest also that science fiction is often engaged in the process of creating new human images of authority, which often seem profoundly antiauthoritative, engineers, host-mothers, or nerds. However my main point is this: in spite of my careful selections of first and last stories, I suspect that much the same points as those I have made here could have been made from any collection of thirty or so science fiction stories chosen by anyone. Certainly I could have reached much the same conclusions by discussing, for instance, not the Wells-Niven-Brin sequence from my collection but the stories by James H. Schmitz, Arthur C. Clarke, James P. Tiptree, Jr., and Paul J. McAuley. Nor were the stories selected to make such points: the points emerge seemingly inevitably from the stories. It is this belief which leads me to my final suggestion, which is about developing a more positive critical strategy for the special case of science fiction. Science fiction is, to a degree unparalleled in modern literature, an intertextual

20


mode. It has often seemed to me as I have read it over the years to be more like a classic folk-tale collection than a great literary tradition. The texts borrow from each other with astonishing speed, vitality, competitiveness and freedom. Yet they are all written by individual authors, nearly all of them perfectly self-conscious and articulate, well able to ridicule fashionable critical attempts to see them as mere clusters of social forces. In spite of its "intertextuality," in no field is the author less dead as faber, as producer; or less important as "authority," as rule-giver. In this field, if nowhere else, I think there is a chance of reviving the dead project of scientificite litteraire, literary scientificity, or to deetymologize it, literary knowledge-making. This would be a search for knowledge not based on analysis alone of "the great classic texts," but on setting individual texts within their paradigms, paradigms which would be formed (just like the morphological paradigms of dead languages) by looking at a lot of individually nonsignificant examples, as I have done in an extremely sketchy way above: to see what was shared and what was not. Could the conclusions then drawn be turned outward on texts which are not science fiction? I would like to think they could, but even if they could not I think the aspiration would be valuable. Near the start of this chapter I suggested that the science fiction field was (in academic circles) like the outsider on the fringe of the cocktail party. Another model might be that of the children's playground. Anthropologists of childhood report that in most areas of fashion—say, popular music—one function of fashion is to exclude those junior. Suppose that at a certain time, for seventeen-year-olds, the in-group is Green Day. Eventually the fifteen-year-olds find out about this and take up the fashion. Fifteen-year-old approaches seventeen-year-old and says "I like Green Day too." But the seventeenyear-old says: "Really? We're all into Limp Biskit now." The word passes down. The thirteen-year-olds find out about Green Day. The fifteen-year-olds find out about Limp Biskit. But already the seventeen-year-olds have gone over to some other group. This model has a certain similarity to critical fashion: the worst thing to be is a "Me-Too-er." By the time you've found out what to say "Me Too" to, it's passe. Better to find what suits your own genius. My own feeling is that science fiction is the field for structural, paradigmatic, intertextual studies, based on an unyielding belief structure, and tolerant of a "fabril" tradition resolutely and deliberately excluded by the literary and rhetorical interpretive community—often a Latin-based interpretive community—since at least late Classical times. What I have said accounts, I think, for some questions often raised in discussions of science fiction. Why are some science fiction authors acceptable in literary circles and some not? The acceptable ones are so because they do not pose the challenge of truth-to-nature to our literary authorities. Why are some authors— C. S. Lewis, Huxley, Orwell, Doris Lessing —given disproportionate space in syllabi and textbooks? Because they are easily assimilable (sometimes against their own will) to established "gatekeeper" paradigms. Why are there continuing debates about "hard science fiction" and "The Cold Equations"? Because these bring in the issue of objective truth too aggressively. What we have to face, meanwhile, are "strategies of neutralization" or, to use

Shippey: Literary

Gatekeepers

21

Howard V. Hendrix's term, "cultural sanctioning mechanisms," backed by the full force of office and faculty politics. We are increasingly offered tolerance, as long as we "know our place." This is an offer I find easy to reject. We might also pursue the strategy of claiming that science fiction falls into the Foucauldian category of "subjugated knowledge," as indeed I have hinted. But one should say more robustly that science fiction is only subjugated in literary academia; and literary academia is subjugated in every other respect—in popular esteem, in its effect on national or international culture, increasingly in student enrollments and in pay scales. By contrast science fiction continues to flourish like a hardy weed and to move out from its literary in-group into the mass media. It is open to us to regard ourselves as on the margins of a marginal group (literary academia or, if one prefers, the MLA) or near the center of a much more central group, our fellow citizens as a whole. Our own personal struggle for "canonization," then, is eminently to be won.

Notes 1. In "Learning to Read Science Fiction," in Fictional Space: Essays on Contemporary Science Fiction, ed. Shippey for the English Association (Oxford: Blackwell and Atlantic; Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1991), 1-33. 2. See Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 63-84. 3. Suvin uses the term in a more abstract way, as a genre indicator, not as a "bit" or "piece" of information. It is part of my argument that nearly all science fiction works have not one but many nova (or novums), just as any paragraph of any non-science fiction work will contain many data (or datums). 4. See John Huntington, "Newness, Neuromancer, and the End of Narrative," in Fictional Space, 63. 5.1 cannot forbear from recording here the comment made by the chairman of a session at which I read a paper at a University of London conference on East European literature in December 1992. At the end of the session, on science fiction, the chair said, as nearly as I can recall his exact words: "What I want to know is when is any of this stuff going to make it into the actual accepted canon?" He was, it is true, severely attacked for saying this; but the stuff/canon antithesis in his mind was no doubt identical with the science fiction/real novel antithesis recorded by Sheila Finch. 6. See The New Medievalism, ed. Marina S. Brownlee et al. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991); The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser (New York: Routledge, 1988). In 1991 the journal Speculum devoted an issue to "the new philology." 7. Howard Felperin, Beyond Deconstruction: the Uses and Abuses of Literary Theory (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), 223. A later page reference in the text is to this edition. 8. Edmund Spenser, Book 3, canto vi, The Faerie Queene, in Poetical Works, ed. J. C. Smith and E. de Selincourt (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), 175. 9. For Aldiss's argument regarding Frankenstein, see Aldiss with David Wingrove, Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction (New York: Atheneum, 1986), 25-52. For the relevance of this to Moreau, see notes 13 and 35. For accounts of early science fiction or proto-science fiction, see Brian Stableford, Scientific Romance in Britain, 18901950 (London: Fourth Estate, 1985); Paul K. Alkon, The Origins of Futuristic Fiction

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(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987); and Alkon, Science Fiction before 1900: Imagination Discovers Technology (New York: Twayne, 1994). 10. Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (1961; Garden City: Doubleday, 1963), 172. 11. H. G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau: A Variorum Text, ed. Robert Philmus (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993), 20. Later page references in the text are to this edition. 12. Philmus, Variorum, 92. 13. It is clear from Philmus's presentation of Wells's first draft of Moreau in Variorum that Wells was trying to give a lead to interpretation by mentioning books. He mentions at one point Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and twelve pages later Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (115, 127). Interestingly this book replaces Shelley's Frankenstein, even in the first draft. All this makes Wells's final concentration on Latin and the classics less likely to be merely casual. 14. The connection is again quite explicitly made in the text. Moreau takes little notice of Prendick until Prendick reveals that he has "done some researches in biology under Huxley" (18), that is, Professor Thomas Huxley, widely known as "Darwin's bulldog" for his public defenses of Darwin's theories. Like Prendick, Wells had at least attended Huxley's lectures in 1884-1885, a fact of which he remained inordinately proud. 15. Wells, Variorum, 197-210. 16. Wells, The Time Machine, in Three Prophetic Novels of H. G. Wells, ed. E. F. Bleiler (New York: Dover Publications, 1960), 315. On this point, see Robert Crossley, "In the Palace of Green Porcelain: Artefacts from the Museums of Science Fiction," in Fictional Space, 76-103, especially 86-90. 17. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels, ed. Martin Price (New York and Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963), 310. 18. See for instance A Casebook on Gulliver among the Houyhnhnms, ed. Milton P. Foster (New York: Crowell, 1961)—which by intention represents generally accepted opinion—where we find Gulliver guilty of pride (279), "sick and morbid pride" (244), etc. 19. A point made by John Huntington, The Logic of Fantasy: H. G. Wells and Science Fiction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 63. 20. This point comes up more than once in essays by Gregory Benford (a practicing scientist as well as science fiction author); see especially "Is There a Technological Fix for the Human Condition?" in Hard Science Fiction, ed. George Slusser and Eric Rabkin (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986), 82-98; and "Science Fiction, Rhetoric, and Realities: Words to the Critic," in Fiction 2000: Cyberpunk and the Future of Narrative, ed. Slusser and Shippey (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), 223-29. 21. When the Sleeper Wakes, in Three Prophetic Novels, 39. 22. Symptomatic are some of the apologetic comments in Philmus's Variorum, for instance the condemnation of Wells for "bigotry and sexism" and the readiness on the next page to see The War of the Worlds as a "satire of imperialism" (xxii, xxiii). 23. For a side-view of this, see the beginning of my "The Critique of America in Contemporary Science Fiction," Foundation, no. 61 (Summer 1994), 36-49. 24. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), chapter 1 passim. 25. J. Douglas Kneale, "Deconstruction," in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, ed. Michael Groden and Martin Kreiswirth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 187.

Shippey: Literary

Gatekeepers

23

26. After reading an early version of this chapter Joseph D. Miller wrote an interesting comment to the effect that doubt and uncertainty have indeed had an effect on the authority of scientific knowledge. "The 'Men who would be King'," he wrote, "have seen their own blood" and "reject the imperial certainty of Newton." I accept these comments, but feel that doubts about objectivity are still a long way from day-to-day science (unlike day-to-day literary criticism). Scientific method furthermore strives conscientiously for self-correction, and has institutionalized doubt and challenge from its inception. 27. In writing this chapter I reviewed the old debate over "the two cultures" from C. P. Snow's 1959 lecture onwards, and was again struck by the petty critical maneuvers of its literary spokesmen. For a balanced view see Martin Green, Science and the Shabby Curate of Poetry: Essays about the Two Cultures (New York: Norton, 1965). 28. For a full account of this incident, see Richard Gleick, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman (New York: Pantheon, 1992), 414-28. Feynman wrote in his final report: "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." See note 20 above. 29. Seen classically in the Tom Godwin story "The Cold Equations" (1954). Controversy about this can be seen in The New York Review of Science Fiction, nos. 54, 60, 64, and 66. One might remember also the extensive series of science fiction satires on scientific bureaucracy, a feature of Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact from at least the early 1960s. 30. See H. Bruce Franklin, War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 149-54. 31. Benford, Fiction 2000, 228. 32. See Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, trans. Laurence Scott (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1975); and Tzvetan Todorov, Grammaire du Decameron (The Hague: Mouton, 1969). 33. See Felperin, 86. 34. As noted in my "Introduction," The Oxford Book of Science Fiction Stories, ed. Shippey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), ix-xxvi, the term "fabril" is not my coinage but that of James Bradley, the University of British Columbia, to whose unpublished writings I also owe the fabril/pastoral opposition and the remarks on Joseph's trade. Later page references in the text to "The Land Ironclads" and "Cloak of Anarchy" are to this edition. 35. It is just possible that some such thought as this may have led Wells to delete the reference to Frankenstein from his first draft of Moreau (see note 13). Despite claims for it as a progenitor of science fiction, Frankenstein is more convinced of the dangers than of the potentials of a new technology.


Chapter 3

Seven Types of Chopped Liver: My Adventures in the Genre Wars Frank McConnell

It's an often-told tale, but it bears—or demands—repeating. When Woodrow Wilson was president of Princeton, one of his political cronies asked him why academic politics was so byzantine, vicious, and brutal. "Ah," replied Wilson. "You must realize: there's so little at stake." I have long thought that that should be engraved upon a plaque to be displayed prominently in every department of literature throughout the Western world. (And, by the way, just wait and see if some politically correct dwortz with a complete set of Baudrillard in translation doesn't, sooner or later, observe that my reference to the "Western world" disqualifies me as hopelessly Eurocentric. We are living, brothers and sisters, in the Season of the Silly.) Emmis: there is so little at stake. But, my God, how much it costs us to admit that. The underside of Wilson's joke is not ironic but gigantically sad. As a former Chicagoan who now lives in, of all places, Lompoc, California, I can attest to the painful truth: the smaller the prize, the more bitter the contest. (Ask the awards jury of the National Book Critics' Circle—or Tonya Harding, whoever's sitting nearer at the bar.) If, as the axiom runs, work expands to fill the time allotted for it, then, contrariwise, anxiety grows in inverse proportion to the real importance of its object. Years ago, at Northwestern, a senior colleague of mine told me, "Look, just publish your book, attend department meetings, and then, when you get tenure, you can do whatever you want. Look at me: I grew a beard." Geez. And that's, I guess, where I want to begin: with the simple, ineluctable, and crushing truth that most of what we academics, we teachers, we critics do is in any realistic taking of accounts trivial. We quarrel about the curriculum; we worry about the "canon" of our subject, whether it be science fiction or lesbian-Chicano postmodernism (and shouldn't that be lesbian-Chicane postmodernism?); and we gather, as often as we can, at scholarly conferences to draw from one another warmth and the reassurance that we are not as alone as we, most of the time, feel. It's an AA kind of thing: hands trembling around my coffee cup, cigarette precarious in the corner of my mouth, I say, "Hi, my name is Frank and I'm a

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recovering New Critic," and you all wave, "Hi, Frank!" Not that there is anything wrong with that. Psychoanalysts, dentists, plumbers, and microbiologists do the same thing—even lawyers, though it must be hell getting the scales off the hotel carpet afterwards. It's the nature of a profession to be esoteric, shamanic: we know something, can do something, says the shaman, that the rest of you don't and can't. But we will do it to, and for, you, and it might hurt a little but that's just because you can't—heh heh—see the big picture the way we do, but it will in the end be good for you. Pay on the way out. And every once in a while the shamans need to get together, trade a few new tricks, tell a few jokes about the biz, feel like insiders. They used to call them "mysteries" or "guilds"; now they're acronyms, like AHA, MLA, or—my personal favorite—the American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies, which parses as ASECS. The only real difference between then and now, as far as I can guess, is that the parties are probably less fun these days. But I'm doing exactly what I want to accuse our profession—the profession of literature—of doing. I'm evading. "Science Fiction, Canonization, Marginalization, and the Academy" is the jawbreaking topic that draws us together, and with luck the topic that will pull us apart, because any belief in our authority to "canonize" or "marginalize" literature is the one delusion beyond all other delusions that is absolutely poisonous to whatever dignity may accrue to the profession we profess. I remember, in the 1960s, reading one of John W. Campbell, Jr.'s interminable editorials in Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact. He was rejoicing over the fact that the English professors had just discovered detective fiction, and were beginning to write intricate, soigne essays and books about Ellery Queen and Raymond Chandler, full of references to Oedipus Rex and Dostoyevsky, establishing— actually, "vetting" is the right word—the form as a legitimate, though of course diminished, version of the great tradition of humanistic discourse. I no longer have that copy of Analog, so cannot quote accurately, but as I remember it, the source of Campbell's joy at this development was, quite simply, that the academics, having discovered detective fiction as a rich and preyable-upon food source, would probably leave science fiction alone, to be pursued only by those who wrote it and loved it. Peace to his honorable ashes. If he had only known. For here we are, in the aftermath of the French Invasion of the Anglo-American university, producing forest-annihilating numbers of essays and books, and distillery-supporting numbers of scholarly conferences, on "science fiction"—a term, let us remember, that was invented only in 1927 by that splendid mediocrity Hugo Gernsback. We are now an established subroutine of the Big Program that is American education, and a lucrative one. When I taught my first course in science fiction, in 1971 at Northwestern—I was dragooned into it—it seemed fairly demimondaine to most of my senior colleagues. (How melancholy to remember that there was a time when the majority of my colleagues were "senior"!) Now, at the University of California at Santa Barbara, the course regularly enrolls six hundred

McConnell: Adventures in the Genre Wars

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to eight hundred students, supports a large number of graduate student teaching assistants, and is a strong bargaining chip with the dean, come budget time. I should feel justified by all that, nicht wahrl Well, shouldn't I? By now it should be clear that I am using the idea of "Science Fiction, Canonization, Marginalization, and the Academy" as a pretext for circling around, and nipping at, the deeper theme that underlies it, namely: what do we really think we're doing? Let me repeat what I have been saying for more than a decade now: I teach science fiction, I write about science fiction, but in my heart of hearts I do not believe that there is any such thing as science fiction; and if that sounds perversely paradoxical, remember that you are dealing with a reader who was trained mainly by near-Jesuits and near-Rabbis. My Jewish father and beloved sensei Harold Bloom writes, in his stunning introduction to The Book ofJ, about the author of the Yahwist tales in Genesis, that "Genre is an inoperative category when the strongest of authors are involved."1 As a good—that is, loyally heretical—son, I want to extend that self-evident truth, and insist that genre is an inoperative category when all but the weakest of authors are involved. And to the weakest of authors we owe, in decency, not critique but simply charity. I recently received a book for review called—the title is the story— Outworld Cats; the kindly man passes by in silence. Even before Harold Bloomed into my life, though, there was Brother John Vianney, C.F.X.—that's Xavieran Brother to you—my proctor for reading period in my sophomore year at St. Francis Xavier High School, Louisville, 1957. When I asked him for something good to read from the school library, he suggested The Picture of Dorian Gray (he thought it a highly moral tale, but that's another story). Besides the file-gumbo sensuality that wafted up as soon as you lifted the cover, and which I surely did dig, what struck me most was one of the aphorisms with which Wilde, a decaffeinated Nietzsche, sprinkles the "Preface" to the novel: "Books are well written, or badly written. That is all."2 Imagine, as they used to say in Republic serials, if this information fell into the wrong hands. If we take Wilde's flippancy seriously—and I think because it is absolutely flippant, it is absolutely serious—then it is an assertion even more outrageous than my revision of Father Bloom's thesis: genre is an inoperative category, and, as they also used to say in Republic serials—the ones where people rode horses instead of rocket sleds—it is Bad Medicine: bad for chief, bad for tribe. (This, by the way, is at least my third violation of our constipational rules of "correct discourse" with which we have inhibited our power to speak rationally about things that really matter.) I repeat: if Wilde is right, then genre is an inoperative category. I think that Wilde is right. I also think—no, I know—that this is the innermost mystery of our craft, not to be revealed to those outside the inner circle, lest the circle itself be revealed to be, nakedly, centerless. Course numberings would disappear—why not talk about seventeenth-century masques and Astaire-Rogers films at the same time? Departments would tremble; does it really make sense to teach Shakespeare and

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ignore the fact that, at precisely the same time, Cervantes also was touched by God? Deans would fall; something of a silver lining, that, I grant, but still a perturbation of the order of things-as-they-are-supposed-to-be. (Remember how poignantly the Israelites, in the time of their deliverance, missed the stupidities of their Egyptian taskmasters—and grow wise.) Could we, as professionals, professors, professing our proficiency in the profession of literature, live at all comfortably with Wilde's axiom? I think not. The burden it lays upon us is too intolerable, too quintessentially human, too truly scary. "Books are well written, or badly written: That is all." What that means, when you break it all down, is that you have to decide about the book you're reading. It means—to paraphrase that good man George Steiner—that when you open a book you take your life into your hands. We all know the truth of that, of course, but how much of our time do we spend suppressing that truth? I can answer only for myself, and I am not happy with the answer: a lot. As usually, uncannily, happens with the topics proposed for the volumes I am asked to contribute to, I find myself wading in deeper and more turbulent waters than I would have chosen to enter. But since I am already half in, like Macbeth, I see no point in turning back, since it would be as exhausting as to go forward. Let's, then, drop the last disguise. Why are we here? Why do we become students and professors of literature? "Inquire of every thing," says Marcus Aurelius, made famous again by Hannibal Lecter, "what it is in itself." What—really—brings us to this place? It can only be that, for each of us in our various ways, the written word—no, strike that, the act of storytelling—is somehow central to our idea of ourselves. It is, to quote John Berryman, our toy, our dream, our rest. It is—how seldom we say these things out loud—our bread and wine. And that makes this—and I have never said anything more seriously here or elsewhere—a kind of communion service. But we are humankind, so we are much more interesting for our flaws and scars than for our hoped-for perfections. And as humans we are also cosmic amphibians, living in the everyday and the visionary, the quotidian and the alcheringa, the dream-time, and never quite sure which is which. (That, as a matter of fact, is the point of a great many of our most important stories, from Gilgamesh to Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination to Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game.) Now what I have to say here is difficult: bear with me if the syntax and the logic seem to be turning involuted, counterintuitive, or even French. We are here because we love, and live, stories. Not "Science Fiction," "Fantasy," or "Horror"; those are marketing labels, like "Mystery," "Western," and "Romance," that make perfect sense on the shelves in B. Dalton's or Borders but none whatsoever in the present context. Just stories. That would be a beautiful fate, to talk forever with trusted friends about the stories you loved most. In fact, with a little wine and a lot of sex, it would be—well, you know. (Loaf of bread optional.) But this is not paradise, it is the university. And the university, not despite but just because of its deeply engrained absurdities, is a nice little model of consciousness itself, at least consciousness in a fallen world (G. K. Chesterton says


29

beautifully that Original Sin is the one theological proposition for which there is empirical evidence). We are brought together by love: I am convinced that the most desiccated, embittered, and alienating teacher of literature you can find preserves, somewhere in the Gothic dungeons of what's left of his heart, the gnostic, aboriginal flame of the first time he fell in love with a story. But how to preserve that flame in this world, where there are, in sequence, exams to be taken, careers to be built, tenure to be sought, and, finally, power over literature to be coveted? The world as idea is diminished to the world as will. I have become increasingly convinced that "science fiction," Brother Gernsback's label, is scandalously inaccurate. If we must call it anything, I suggest we call it "technological gnosticism." From Mary Shelley to H. G. Wells to William Gibson and Octavia E. Butler, its archetypal plot seems to be the attempt of a hero, a consciousness trapped in a mechanistic universe, to discover whatever there is of transcendence within or beyond the quotidian. Sometimes the quest succeeds (Wells's In the Days of the Comet, 2001: A Space Odyssey); sometimes it fails (Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; Aldous Huxley's Brave New World); sometimes it is ambiguous (Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow; Gibson's Neuromancer; Blade Runner). But always it is the same quest. Now I want to suggest that the gnostic paradigm applies not just to the fiction, but to the lives of those who write it, write about it, and teach it. In the gnostic urmyth, Sophia, "Wisdom," falls from or departs from the original unity or plenum, the "Father," into the world of the Contingent—our world—from which, eventually, she is redeemed to reascend to the Whole. I remark in passing that the power of this myth is evident in its reappearance in venues as disparate as the sublimities of William Blake and the K-Mart soporifics of Scientology. A graduate student of mine recently told me that one of my colleagues had told her, and the other people in his seminar, that what they should do is read the journals, find out what critical approaches seemed most au courant, and plan their dissertations to catch that wave. Sound advice, I told her, if you want to regard this business as a nine-to-five profession. But if that is what you want to do, then why not be completely honest and get a gig playing piano in a whorehouse? The pay would be commensurate, and you'd meet a more varied set of people. Because that kind of thinking, in the context of our lives, is the fall of Sophia into Contingency. It's the moment when we allow theory to usurp reading, when we allow the concept of genre to intrude upon the naked power of the story at hand, when we turn the Book (a holy word) into the Text (a shabby one). It is not even trahison, but revolution des clercs, the school of resentment's rage to efface what they themselves cannot create, the diffident arrogance of a De Man, a Derrida, a Jameson, a Fish, all of whose productions Pope anticipated well before the fact: Beauty that shocks you, parts that none will trust, Wit that can creep, and Pride to lick the dust.3 W. H. Auden, Pope's smarter reincarnation, cut even closer to the bone in his 1946

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poem, "Under Which Lyre." Contrasting the antinomian sons of Hermes with the sons of the academically correct, department-forming Apollo, he writes that the god of tenure "Unable to invent the lyre, Creates . . . Official art."4 And there it is. Arguments about canonization and marginalization, whether they are about science fiction or the need to hire an "eighteenth-century man" or about the place of Middle English studies in the curriculum, are really about—a phrase as bitter as Campari straight, no rocks—"official art." The power to say that, for example, Heinlein's Stranger in A Strange Land is science fiction and Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale is not has, finally, nothing whatsoever to do with the nature of either book, nor with the always-already-null category "science fiction," but only with power. I find it grimly amusing that contemporary critics, so acute to note and catalogue inscriptions of hegemony in virtually every stream and tributary of human endeavor, either forget about it or become uneasily complicit in the game when it's a matter of their own profession. When Michel Foucault told us that power always inscribes only itself, I think he meant that "only." I think he was right. Authority in the academy is simply territorial behavior, and territorial behavior in the fashion of the great cats: baring fangs we never intend to use, and spraying the trees we want for our private scratching-posts. Hence my title, "Seven Types of Chopped Liver." It's chopped liver at a Sabbath meal on the wrong side of Delancey Street, but it's pate at a cocktail party in the suburbs. It's "the movies" on Saturday night with your—how to say this in the age of semantic fascism?—with your personfriend whom you desperately want to canoodle, but it's "cinema" when you're writing for Camera Obscura on, say, "Homosociality, Anality, and G/gz." In both cases the thing named is the same, but the name is an inscription of power or relative powerlessness—a spraying. And there's so little at stake: only the radiance of the thing in itself. But let me be autobiographical for a short while: given my age and lifestyle, it's probably high time. / fell in love with stories—gnostically, entered the plenum—when, on Valentine's Day in the sixth grade, the object of my passion, named, no kidding, Martha Sue Fritz, gave me a Groff Conklin paperback anthology of "science fiction," when I didn't even know what it was. Grumpy and disappointed back home (never mind what I'd hoped for), I flipped at random to a story with at least a catchy title: "Blood's a Rover," by Chad Oliver. Three or four hours later—I had even missed Dragnet, Big Town, Martin Kane, Private Investigator, and Inner Sanctum on the radio—I had concluded, finishing the book, that there could be nothing neater than being a writer. Not a spaceman, not an interdimensional swashbuckler, not the hero of the stories, but the guy who made up the stories. (The scientific term for this condition is, or should be, Nerditas Incipiens.) Oliver was the finest of men, as were Poul Anderson, Frederik Pohl, and, even if she was a girl, Judith Merril. I'm still not sure I was mistaken. Martha Sue Fritz sank below the horizon of my desire, or at least of my initiative, not long after. But she had initiated me, though not as expected. Science fiction—especially my beloved Planet Stories—comics, my dad's Mickey Spillane


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mysteries (which he bought for the covers and I read for the stories and then / noticed the covers), Ellery Queen, our old Gustave Dore-illustrated Bible, A.L. Rouse's brave and (I was to find) hopelessly inadequate translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and then in high school, Wilde and the forbidden, preached-against-atMass Lolita and Les Fleurs du Mai for which I was slammed on the head by Brother Benedict, C.F.X., when he saw it on my desk, as he shouted, "Don't you know this man was a sinnerT' and tore up the—my—book (I guess this was my first argument with literary authority): when I imagine the plenum I remember that time. Because there was not a time in all that time when stories, when what John Barth calls plangently "the ocean of story,"5 were not my toy, my dream, my rest. The point of this perhaps stupefying narrative is that concepts of genre, or of hierarchy, of more and less great, never meant very much to me. Of course I heard about them, and of course I behaved as if I knew what they meant, but to be perfectly honest I never did. I discovered Johann Sebastian Bach, Charlie Parker, and Jerry Lee Lewis at about the same time. Though I still think Bird is better than the other two, it does not seem anarchic to me to put all three on the CD carousel and punch "Random Play"—and while we're talking about carousels, I'll throw Rodgers and Hammerstein and, what the hell, John Philip Sousa into the hopper too. When I arrived at Cornell for my first teaching assignment, I had finished a dissertation on William Wordsworth's Prelude and published an essay on William Burroughs's Naked Lunch. A very senior colleague, and distinguished scholar of romanticism, asked me how I could reconcile writing about those two authors. I felt like Stevie Wonder in the Louvre: say what? Which is what I did six years later, when I began teaching science fiction at Northwestern. As I said, I was dragooned: the course was already established, but the fellow who taught it was on leave; I'd written a few things about horror films and such, so the chairman asked me if I'd like to take it over for a quarter. Of course I would, I said. The quarter, it turned out, would extend to over twenty years, doing science fiction at least once every one of those years. But here's an interesting detail, the one that brought on that Stevie Wonder feeling again. By my third year of doing the course, I discovered—through the infallible grapevine that, serpentine and anonymous, both undermines and reinforces all workplaces—that I had jeopardized my position in the department by teaching science fiction. Enrollments were large; I had published a book on Wordsworth and a book on film; and that was precisely the problem. It was becoming increasingly unclear what my specialty was—or if I had a specialty at all. In an unforgettable interview with my chairman—the same one who had given me science fiction in the beginning and a dear and valued friend to this day—I was told, "Frank, you should think very seriously whether you want people to regard you as a generalist." I had never heard the word before, and I fear I heard it now in a different key— major as opposed to minor—than my friend had intended. "I'm a generalise." I thought to myself, with the excitement of the bourgeois gentilhomme discovering that he'd been speaking prose all his life. "A generalist. Wow." Soon I found

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myself teaching, besides science fiction, a year-long course in World Literature and courses in the Film Division, and writing a book on Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, John Barth, and Thomas Pynchon. My critical heroes, psychopomps in the absolute sense of the word, had been, besides Bloom, R. P. Blackmur, Kenneth Burke, and Northrop Frye; and it is a source of the 3:00 A.M. blues for me that I know I will never approach the splendor of even their minor work. "Generalist," applied to those national treasures, is not only an honorific but a first articulation of their strength; and it may be significant that, of the four, only Bloom holds a Ph.D. in English. Ever get the feeling God is winking at you? But bastal There is one genre which I do believe in—autobiography—and only St. Augustine, Benjamin Franklin, Malcolm X, and Graham Greene should be allowed to practice it. I have heard more than my share of public reminiscences by mid-life and mid-talent intellectuals, and they are uniformly underwhelming. ("God," as the actor Jack Cassidy used to proclaim when in his cups, "it's lonely at the middle!") And I don't want to appear soi-disant ("And then I wrote . . "),fauxnaif (Tom Sawyer among the cannibals) or—the ninth circle—old fart ("Listen, youngster, in my day we didn't even have Xeroxing and e-mail!"). The point of my tangled tango down memory lane is just to indicate what, and why, I have to feel the way I do about the idea of "canonization and marginalization" as it applies to our racket. I think it is the fallen world of the Contingent and the blind angel Samael, gnosticism's bungling and blind god of the Contingent. Which brings me to the second half of my title: "My Adventures in the Genre Wars." Truth to tell, there were none. A psychic Switzerland, I made my separate peace with the literary Mods and Rockers, went on teaching and writing about what I cared about—my chocolates and cuckoo clocks, if you must—and largely ignored the battles of the theorists, because the theorists reminded me of the warring angels in Paradise Lost, impossible abstractions crunching about in clunky armor that only got in their way: an NFL of wraiths, or the new clothes with no Emperor inside. My one brief sortie was when I did an essay for The Wilson Quarterly, in 1990, on Deconstruction, observing that D-con brought up some interesting points but was by no means the apocalyptic transvaluation of all values it claimed to be.6 J. Hillis Miller responded with a charmingly vituperative letter in a later issue, accusing me of intellectual dishonesty tantamount to proposing a threesome in a crack house. My real problem, he wrote, was that "McConnell is no longer where the action is."7 As Jack Benny used to say so eloquently: Well\ I didn't want to be where the action was. I didn't want to play piano in a whorehouse, or dance before Samael the blind. I was—wow! again—a generalist, and the plenum and I were getting along just fine, thank you. Kenneth Burke wrote a letter, too. He thought I had a flair for pointed anecdote, but had some suggestions about how to extend my argument. I bought a fifth of brandy, ajar of oysters, and ajar of caviar. All of this should strike you as excessively smarmy. Authority may be the blind god, but if he did not exist, we would have to invent him, even to our cost. It is only the Contingent that can lead us to the plenum, and even Auden admits that, if the sons of Hermes were allowed to run things, things would quite soon go to hell in a


33

handbasket. Apollo, Samael, the Dean, the curriculum, the canon, official art, the profession, the racket: they are not altogether the enemy, because without their constrictions—our constrictions, our mind-forged manacles—we could never really taste the pang, the sudden glory, of our freedom. To paraphrase Gerard Manly Hopkins, it is the mess man was born for, embedded in the substantifique mo 'elle of consciousness itself, which is language. Ever since Saussure—actually, ever since Augustine—we have known that the paradox of language is that it is both authoritarian and anarchic. You can say anything you want (at least before the invasion of the academic brain police); you cannot say anything that is not allowed by the rules of grammar. If a photon is both wave and particle, a word is both a liberation and a binding—quite literally, in the usage of magic, a spell. En chacque signe dort ce monstre: un stereotype, writes Roland Barthes: "Within every sign sleeps the monster, the stereotype."8 (Actually he is reprising here the much stronger observation of E. M. Cioran, Sous chacque formula git un cadavre, "Beneath every formulation lies a corpse."9) But, as Wittgenstein says, Ein Ausdruck hat nur im Strome des Lebens Bedeutung: "An expression has meaning only in the stream of life."10 I apologize for the near-Talmudic citing of opinions. (Well, in fact, I don't.) But the emergent point is that the arguments against authority are hard-wired into our very nature. Given that eternal, internal struggle reaching from our forebrains to our institutions and even to our crucial yearning to give to the Void a human life, are there any sensible things to say? I think there are, and here are a few. First, we can rethink the idea I have heard, that science fiction is engaged in contests for authority. The Greek word for "contest" is agon, and it is under this term that we have, in the academy, largely configured our behavior. Agon implies "struggle," "competition," even—and obviously—"antagonism." It suggests that we are in a serious business. (Miller, in his letter about my D-con piece, said that he would not have bothered to discipline me were it not that the issues involved were so "deadly serious."1' Deadly serious? As in an essay in a policy-oriented journal on a critical fad?) I suggest that we shift terms from Greek to Latin. The Latin word, ludus, is roughly the equivalent of the Greek agon, but its connotations are "play," "game," even—and obviously—"interlude." It suggests that we are in a delightful business. I said earlier that most of what we do is trivial. That was an obvious half-truth, or I wouldn't be here. We are trivial when, accepting the covenant of Apollo or Samael, we posture as if what we did matters; but we matter—and matter in ways poor Samael can't see—when we admit—and giggle about it, too—that all our canons and borderlines and frontiers are there just so we can cross them. The sons of Hermes love to play, And only do their best when they Are told they oughtn't; Apollo's children never shrink From boring jobs but have to think Their work important.12

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I would nominate Auden as our patron saint, were that itself not just too Apollonian, and were not he already, I am sure, enjoying another and more exalted tenure. So let me turn from Auden to Roland Barthes, another of the critics, along with Blackmur, Burke, Frye, and Bloom, to whose memory and achievement every day I light a candle in the quiet room of my heart. The line from Barthes I quoted earlier is from his inaugural lecture in 1977 as Professor at the College de France. The lecture is a short and stunning explication of what he thinks it means to be a teacher and writer, and I think it is a holy thing. All language is the inscription of power, he argues (his friend, that brilliant and vile man, Foucault, is obviously in the wings here); all literature is an inscription of power, and all university systems are ditto, except for the act of teaching—which subsumes the act of writing criticism. And that is a performance whose glory is its powerlessness. It is ludus, not agon, the free space of discourse where the Contingent cedes to the plenum. I translate his conclusion, with apologies for violating his prose: "That experience has, I think, an ancient and currently unfashionable name, which I will dare to say here in the full complexity of its etymology: Sapientia, no power, a little knowledge, a little wisdom, and the greatest possible delight."13 At this point, with Barthes as my shield, let me begin to conclude. I have referred throughout this chapter to what we all do for a living as both a profession and a racket. If it is only what we do for a living, then it is only a profession or a racket. It's the chopped liver syndrome again. "Profession" and "racket" are the same thing, except the guys in the racket don't have to claim so much of their income for the IRS. But neither of these terms really applies to anyone here; otherwise you, like me, wouldn't be here. Think about the word vocation. It means "calling," but it also means "called." It is pretty close to the concept of "shaman," and to the Hebrew word for prophet, navi, and a galaxy away from anything like the concept of "priest," "minister," or "authority." It's what you are. It isn't a profession, it's a habit of, and compulsion to, the highest level of play. It is not useful or practical, and there is no sane reason for society to support it, except that society is smart enough to realize that it would go mad without it. It is anarchic and sloppy and, at its best, it can't really tell the difference between Henry James and Robert A. Heinlein, and boy do the priests ever hate that, but it wears the smile of Dionysus and the priests dare not approach too close. It will not cure racism or urban crime or gender discrimination because it knows Auden was right when he said, "Poetry makes nothing happen,"14 but without it everybody would forget why they wanted to do those things. It is as sublimely useless and silly as religion itself. Maybe it is religion itself: the catch in the breath of a dying animal at the opening sentence of Neuromancer or Berryman's last "Dream Song" or Magic Johnson almost anytime. Sapientia, says Barthes. The Fool in Lear, say I. What Moses heard from the burning bush. Or, maybe, just—teacher. Science fiction—which, we now all agree, is not really a genre at all—provides


35

two salient examples of the chances for the ultimate outcome of any challenge to authority: Well's The Time Machine and Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End. In Wells, the Eloi, the Children of Light, are allowed to play and gambol in a fruitarian Disneyland to their hearts' content, but always with the suppressed awareness that the Morlocks, the un-men who run the machines that keep the world alive, are maintaining them only eventually to devour them. (No one who has lived with the administration of the University of California recently can fail to find this scenario uncannily familiar.) In Clarke, on the other hand, the Overlords, outworld beings only superficially Satanic, dominate and micromanage human society, but only so that the humans themselves may eventually evolve into purely spiritual beings and join the cosmic community of other purely spiritual beings from which the Overlords, sorrowing servants of the plenum, are forever excluded. (No one who has listened to the selfjustification of the University of California recently can fail to find this scenario uncannily familiar.) Both Wells and Clarke are wrong. The true story would be a union of the two, but such an act of subtlety and visitation of grace that can come, if at all, only in the playing-out of a life and not in the telling of a tale. We are teachers, shamans. And our vocation is to teach courses in "Science Fiction," courses in "The Novel," courses in "Shakespeare," because that is what Samael needs us to do to keep the records straight. But our vocation is to teach science fiction, and the novel, and Shakespeare, and the early recordings of Miles Davis, if we feel like it, because that is what we need to stay alive. That is Barthes's Sapientia—which, need I say it, is the Latin for the gnostic Sophia. I am delighted that another chapter in this volume refers to "The Grails of Science Fiction"—because I have long thought that the whole activity of criticism, and therefore of teaching, is a belated version of the Grail Quest. In Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival, the earliest fully developed Grail narrative, Parzival finds himself in the Grail Castle and witnesses the mystery of the Grail. He is not sure what is going on, and being a shy lad, asks no questions about what he has seen. He is berated for his failure to ask: if he had only asked the right questions, he is told, the Grail would have been redeemed and the wounded Grail-King would have been saved. He leaves the Castle in disgrace, and spends most of the remainder of the book learning what he should have known when he first entered the Castle. Finally, at the end of his walkabout, he comes back to the Castle, asks the right questions, and the king and the land are healed. Take Parzival as the reader—you, me, our students—and take the Grail as the Book (I will not say "text"), and take the Castle as the edifice of authority, forbidding and even a little adversarial, that both needs the mystery completed and yet is anxious about it being too well completed: for when the mystery of the Grail is done, then the Castle of the Grail declines to irrelevance. And you have our collective autobiography. We all—we and our students and our colleagues—were at one time or another surprised by the radiance of Story, and found ourselves in thrall. And we entered

36Scienc n, Cano ization,Marginalization


the Castle of the mystery, only to find that the Castle was inhospitable unless we learned the right questions. And learn them we did, if we were lucky and canny, and ask them we did, and we regained our first joy of the Grail, as the Castle, now no longer necessary, evanesced around us. But it is still a real Castle for our students. And our quest, unless it was all just a bad joke, which it could have been and still could be, should have turned into a vocation. That vocation, at least as I see it, is to teach that authority is the least of things to worry about, to keep an eye fixed steady on the Grail itself, and to obey the rules of the Castle even as we inculcate the questions that will end the Castle and—one last thing—to always ask those questions with the smile of Dionysus on our lips. There's so much at stake.

Notes 1. Harold Bloom, "Introduction," The Book ofJ, trans. David Rosenberg, interpreted by Harold Bloom (New York: Random House, 1990), 13. 2. Oscar Wilde, "Preface," The Picture of Dorian Gray, in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, Volume 7F(New York: Wise & Co., 1927), 5. 3. Alexander Pope, "An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot," in The Poems of Alexander Pope, Volume IV: Imitations of Horace, ed. John Butt (London: Methuen, 1939), 120. 4. W. H. Auden, "Under Which Lyre," in Selected Poems, New Edition, edited by Edward Mendelson (New York: Random House, 1979), 180. 5. John Barth, "The Ocean of Story," in The Friday Book: Essays and Other Nonfiction (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1984), 84-90, and elsewhere. 6. Frank D. McConnell, "Will Deconstruction Be the Death of Literature?" Wilson Quarterly, 14 (Winter 1990), 99-109. 7. J. Hillis Miller, "Defending Deconstruction" (letter), Wilson Quarterly, 14 (Summer 1990), 143. 8. Roland Barthes, Lecon: Lecon Inaugurate de la Chaire de Semiologie Literaire du College de France, Prononcee le 7 Janvier 1977 (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1978), 15; my translation. 9. E. M. Cioran, Precis de Decomposition (Paris: Galliland, 1949), 13; my translation. 10. Ludwig Wittgenstein, cited in Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir (London: Oxford University Press, 1958), 93. 11. Miller, 143. 12. Auden, "Under Which Lyre," 179. 13. Barthes, [46]; my translation. 14. Auden, "In Memory of W. B. Yeats," Selected Poems, 82.

Chapter 4

The Things Women Don't Say Susan Kray

No matter how seriously we try to challenge "patriarchal" assumptions, we often end by defaulting to them. What began as innovation ends by reinforcing the familiar. Hence, as Robin Roberts notes, "feminist science fiction . . . [is] informed by what has been identified by psychologists as a feminine sensibility."1 Feminist science fiction is also informed by politics directly based on a traditionally patriarchal or "masculinist" agenda. For example, consider the emphasis on difference in "real life." As Catherine MacKinnon points out, the interests of male dominance are well served when we dwell on differences, because the female is always marked as "different"—different from a male standard—rather than the other way around. Men, of course, are just as different from women as women are from men, but "For each of their differences from women, what amounts to an affirmative action plan is in effect, otherwise known as the [taken-for-granted] structure and values of American society."2 Languages (to overgeneralize) even create feminine grammatical forms by adding feminine markers to masculine default forms (hero + "ine" = heroine). Societies struggle to decide how different women are or should be from men, assuming a normative male standard and asking what protections or restrictions should apply to women. Societies do not ponder how men deviate from the normative female standard or ask what protections or restrictions should apply to men. Feminists generally build on this same debate, many insisting on difference, a few denying it. And science fiction and fantasy are if anything more fanatically gender conscious than other genres, including romance; even attempts to break away merely reaffirm the politics of gender. On the whole, even works of science fiction and fantasy blessed by feminist critics take the archetypal gender underpinnings of American society much as they find them. After all, no genre can explore everything. Some factors must be held constant while one varies the others. Celebrated works of science fiction and fantasy usually assume the immutability of familiar gender arrangements, often speculating that they imply deep truths about

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all humanity or even the nature of life. For instance, our genre abounds with stories that put one or two women in an otherwise male, high-tech workplace, then scrutinize their faces and bodies for attractiveness and their lives for romantic relationships. The subgenre of feminist dystopia also offers ostensibly feminist stories predicated on the assumption that, dismal as real-life sexism can be, you ain't seen nothing yet. If reality displeases you, you'll hate the fantasy. It is amazing how ingenious human minds can be in imagining bad things that might happen to women. It is even more amazing how limited authors—including feminist science fiction authors—can be when it comes to imagining women engaging in science fiction's two main enterprises: having adventures and solving problems. When science fiction was young, its enthusiastic marking of gender distinctions was not seen as a political act, no matter how extreme or awkwardly executed. It was natural, not a result of an agenda, that in brave new societies, in dreary dystopias, and among transgalactic aliens, there must be males and females; the latter responsible for feelings, domesticities, love, reproduction, being rescued, and asking straight-man questions. The existing agenda is always the invisible one. It is never seen as political: only challenges to it are. For example, Marion Zimmer Bradley, as a fantasy/science fiction editor looking for interesting heroines, warned against characters who say "this isn't women's work," but worried about her warning. She demanded that heroines "must start out as strong, liberated and enlightened . . . they should not have to prove their right to existence/equality. I don't want to print dozens of stories proving and re-proving the right for women to do things on their own." Yet she also feared that she may fall into being "politically correct," as if "this isn't women's work" were agenda-free and nonpolitical.3 This is not, of course, some blind spot on the part of this editor; challenges to the status quo—which is taken for granted as "natural"—naturally seem "political" to nearly all of us. Instead, we might argue that science fiction and fantasy have always been political with respect to gender; occasional feminist phases do not seriously challenge the existing politicization, but rather expand upon it. Feminist science fiction and fantasy largely adopt masculinist assumptions about female human nature which determine the form of feminist solutions, such as these familiar standbys: household collectives, kin-groups, sexual freedom, permeable hierarchies, and deurbanization.41 explore the politics of gender in science fiction and fantasy— feminist or otherwise—by investigating how the genre does not deal with men, housework, child care, power, status, work, and fun. I address things authors do not say and images they do not offer. Masculinist Politics In science fiction, the "masculinist agenda" was—and largely remains—to explore the adventure of masculinity. This technological, rational, problem-solving, frontier-

Kray: The Things Women Don 't Say

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exploring, envelope-pushing masculinity5 is constructed against the imagined alternative—femininity, seen as both conventional and mysterious. Hence the frequency of coy, awkward references to femaleness, some still on the order of "Gosh, I didn't know they'd send a girl pilot." Mostly male work teams and roledivided households are common. One of technological man's pastimes is wondering about femaleness, how it works, what it is up to, and how it could possibly function in a high-tech environment. Oftener than one likes to think, the answer is that a girl or woman uses cosmetic or prosthetic technology to enhance her hair, nails, eyes, or skin. Female characters are still regularly described much like women in newspapers of the 1940s and 1950s, in terms of their appearance, girlish preoccupations, womanly concerns, and ability to interest male characters.6 Female characters regularly serve as bit parts and foils in roles unrelated to technology. Sometimes, men use technology to construct, from ideal materials, an ideal, womanshaped sexual partner or, perhaps, a caste of artificial prostitutes for a population of space-faring men. If boy technology explores, girl technology primps and panders. Traditionally, efforts to break out of the mold often result in reinforcing it. Pamela Sargent notes that science fiction has often showed matriarchies as featuring "simple role reversals," as "more barbaric than men would be in similar circumstances," even as enforcing insectlike social arrangements, at least until matriarchy renounces female rule for a more "natural" power structure.7 Today, science fiction still shows female characters mainly in secondary, incidental, or even offstage roles, for example, as the mother who writes to the protagonist (usually male) or appears in his memories. Rare indeed are female protagonists; even these often appear in traditional female-character lines of work, doing reproductive things and magical-healing things. Female characters may occasionally get interesting technological work, but the author may compulsively call them back to reproductive duty or doom them to untimely death. Early in 1994, author Jeffrey Kooistra does both: a rare adventure heroine, Debra Anne, "working . . . to be the best hypermotor engineer the Academy had ever seen," first gets pregnant, then sacrifices her life (and the fetus) in the line of duty.8 It's a yo-yo life, being a female science fiction hero; one may escape old constrictions for a moment, but not forever.

Feminist Politics Feminist science fiction and fantasy, amazingly, share much of science fiction's masculinist agenda. Feminists build on old themes when they obsess about femaleness and wonder how it could work better, if women could be freed of the need to cope with problems men create. Utopian feminist science fiction also wonders how those others, those males, can be written out of the story or given peripheral roles so females can get on with constructive living. It asks how one can be female and something else at the same time, how to have fun and do productive

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work (in the economists' traditional sense) while also raising children. Feminist science fiction sometimes obsesses about female sexual and reproductive systems (as in A Weave of Women, In the Mother's Land, and The Gate to Women's Country). In general, feminist science fiction behaves like real-life women who have just been told they're now free to do it all—housework, dependent care, emotional work, and paid labor, too. Stunned by gratitude, they dutifully start figuring out how to do it all. On the other hand, I have not read science fiction, feminist or otherwise, in which the answer to the child-care question is, "Oh, the men are handling that. Can we stick to the important issues?" Nor does one see male-female relationships handled in truly radical ways.9 Overall, the more feminist the vision, the more communal, committed, kin-oriented, and child-centered it gets. Isaac Asimov expressed my own feelings toward this concept when he described reality as an escape from science fiction. Feminist science fiction does not match the radical fancies of two other female genres: romance and fan fiction. Both genres offer women's fantasies of what life could be like, if only . . . . If the personal is political, the generic may be even more so. The romance and fan genres each suppose a society profoundly different from the one reality provides; unlike feminist science fiction, both presuppose a new, improved kind of man. And, astoundingly, both genres are completely excluded from literary "canons," even those constructed by feminist critics. Romance Fiction It is no wonder that romance authors often describe their genre as "fantasy." Its heroes are "really" women, in terms of conventional personality traits.10 Its heroines have a variety of choices without the coy haggling, still endemic in science fiction and fantasy, about what women should or shouldn't do.11 Romance fiction challenges conventional sex arrangements. Hero and heroine both obsess about their relationship; both take responsibility for it. Heroines' decisions are frequently determined by their professional commitments and aspirations. It is in romance fiction that we find this surprising mother-daughter discussion. Notice that their ages—mother in her seventies, daughter in late forties—would exclude these characters from most science fiction narratives, which still tend to the Susan Calvin template (at forty, she was past sexuality). However, if the characters are unlikely, the scenario is even more so. Responding to her divorced daughter's confusion about the men who have so lusted after her on dates that they could not postpone performance long enough to disrobe, the mother "defamiliarizes"12 men's sexuality, describing it in terms that give us a stranger's perspective—a stranger's radical perspective: "Well, they can't help it, dear. Men's sex equipment isn't as well designed as ours, somehow. Not only that it's not as indestructible, but they can't always control it too well, either. Their response is sometimes too fast or too slow. Too much or too little. Sometimes


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. . . they get so swept away they go off when they didn't intend to . . . . It wouldn't matter, but they expect perfection of themselves."13 While the seventy-something mother describes as strange something that has been naturalized in our culture—men's sexual organization—the daughter naturalizes phenomena our culture considers alien: sexuality in a woman nearing fifty and the capacity of a good woman to feel desire for more than one man: "The problem is, Mother, I liked it all so much, I could have done everything with any one of them . . . how can I be so eager with three different men?"14 Romance heroines regularly display anger and sexual aggressiveness, though not often together, as in this scene between a heroine and her reticent lover: "Do you have any idea how angry [you make me]? . . . I've had it with you! Come with me! . .. I'm going to .. . turn on all the lights, and kiss you silly in front of the windows. In front of anyone who's inside and anyone who happens to pass by . . . . Come on! Now, bucko!"15 And of course, the bottom line of every romance is that no matter how unreasonable, outspoken, aggressive, or sexually demanding (or reticent) the heroine is, the hero always comes back for more. He's there for life. That is the ultimate fantasy element. It is interesting that romance fiction, patronized by scholars16 and widely ridiculed as patriarchal propaganda promoting female helplessness, pushes the boundaries of gendering so far, while the self-styled literature of ideas is often mired in the cute, the coy, and the compulsive. Media-Based Fan Fiction Another genre, focusing on romantic/ erotic relationships between male pairs,17 builds on both romances and male buddy stories. Noncommercial, media-based fan fiction18 centering around male-male relationships is written, privately circulated, and read almost entirely by women.19 Typically, two heterosexual buddies are drawn reluctantly into a homoerotic relationship based in their shared work.20 Their love is passionate, tender, egalitarian, and adventurous. It is unique in their community, not part of a homosexual subculture. The meaning of this genre to its audience is difficult to discover. Direct questioning of fan-writers elicits such answers as "I like men and if one is good, two is better" or, less comprehensibly, "if one of them was a woman, there would be housework and who wants a hero washing socks?"21 Clever scholarly indirection, however, uncovers an interesting sidelight on the readers' attitudes toward gender. This genre eschews female heroines. In fact, the fan community cautions new writers against creating a "Mary Sue," a heroine wannabe who makes herself ridiculous by attempting too much: she is scornfully characterized as "saving the universe six times before breakfast." Another tradition is that of the female minor character who "unfairly" thwarts a hero, as did T'Pring of Star Trek, whom some fans angrily characterize as a "bitch."22 It would not be going too far to say that this women's genre, which is supported

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by a women's community profoundly friendly to women, is actively hostile to female characters. Arguably, this genre gives women a chance to imagine having it all—adventure, status, primacy in hand-to-hand combat, and one true, egalitarian, all-satisfying love—precisely because it gives readers a chance to avoid thinking about women's lives. Heroines are eschewed and villainesses jeered because the presence of female characters threatens the fantasy about egalitarian partners who are adventurous, technological overachievers. Women authors seem to find the "I want it all" fantasy impossibly daring for female characters; they project it onto male characters. Female images are there only to be transcended and left behind.

Exclusions To sum up before going on, each agenda is built on exclusions. The masculinist agenda builds on American buddy fiction to construct an exciting, problem-solving masculinity in the absence of and in contrast to women24 as masculinist science fiction imagines them—domestic, tedious, romantic, non-technical, peripheral. The masculinist agenda does not obsess about what maleness means in relation to females; instead it explores maleness in relation to challenges from aliens, technology, and other men. Such science fiction does not ponder how men are going to manage their responsibilities and stresses as primary co-care-givers. Females as heroes are almost entirely excluded. Media-based fan fiction inducts male buddies into the female tradition of romantic love: obsessive, all-satisfying, tender, and permanent, though still not domestic. This is an egalitarian vision: both lovers have it all, including nearly equal status in the world. To achieve this equality, females are again excluded,25 except as peripheral or offstage characters. Romance novels build on a tradition going back at least to Pride and Prejudice. The heroine speaks her mind and asserts her independence and she gets her man;26 in recent years, she also succeeds in her chosen profession or business. Society supports their relationship. She gets it all, except that the background is still a man's world. Equality is excluded. Feminist Science Fiction and Fantasy In a fourth genre, the relatively small subgenre of feminist Utopian science fiction, men are peripheralized or excluded. A frequent theme is that men are a problem population that must be controlled or escaped. The author solves the problem through plague or segregation. Something has to exclude men from civilized territory, does it not, if women are to live in peace? Living in peace often means a craft- and agriculture-based collective,27 probably organized around matrilineal clans, perhaps with elite, older women managing the community's reproduction. The social structure is a shallow, permeable, shifting hierarchy. The house is often


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an important feature of the domestic landscape, as it is in romances (which one observer describes as girl meets house, girl loses house, girl gets house). The genre focuses on individuals in groups, dwelling only a little on female-female romantic pairs. With few levels of hierarchy, boundaries between levels and occupations are permeable and shifting: people can relax, run things sensibly, be themselves, because there are no men around, or only a few male-hierarchy rejects unfit for the bullying, blustering life men lead in exile out on the prairie or wherever one's male characters are stashed. The familial men quietly fit into the female community, performing domestic and emotional services—sort of idealized maids. The bad news is that just when you thought your escape reading would help you dodge domesticity, you find yourself in a country where everybody shares housework and dependent care. Even the personal relationships are hard work; heavy, encompassing, and fraught—just like, God forbid, real life. And there aren't enough good men to go around. And these are the Utopias. If the Utopias are not bad enough, consider masculinist and feminist dystopic communities. Women are often either (1) slaves, possibly in chains, illiterate, ignorant, barefoot, pregnant, and blank-eyed with misery, because nobody gives them any education or health care—and do not even think about fun;28 (2) a valiant few struggling to survive in an unpleasant world; or (3) arrogant fools trying to govern without men and creating instead a totalitarian tyranny that manipulates and dehumanizes men. To oversimplify, in dystopias, men with power turn women into livestock; women with power are like men, only worse,29 maybe turning society into anthills, unless—in Utopias—they escape men completely, in which case they are much better than men, but still exploit and control men (as, for example, in Suzy McKee Charnas's Walk to the End of the World and Motherlines, Sargent's The Shore of Women, and Elisabeth Vonarburg's In the Mother's Land). Somewhere between the Utopias and dystopias lie what I call mesotopias, worlds not too different in their gender arrangements from our "real world," at least as the media and fiction usually represent it. Mesotopian moods range from depressing to cheerful, with Tiptree's vision at the former end of the spectrum, in "The Women Men Don't See." Leaving Earth with aliens, a secretary from New York, knowing she'll never be missed, explains: "I don't hate men. That would be as silly as hating the weather . . . [but] women have no rights . . . except what men allow us . . . . When the next real crisis upsets them, our so-called rights will vanish like . . . smoke . . . . And whatever has gone wrong will be blamed on our freedom, like the fall of Rome was . . . . What women do is survive. We live by ones and twos in the chinks of your world-machine."30 Mesotopias may have Utopian (or dystopian) enclaves. Bradley's occasional Darkover girl or woman who escapes—or is ejected from—a patriarchal household may find her way to Thendara House and join the Amazons, female mercenaries. The occasional girl or woman who escapes the male-misruled Holdfast can join the Riding Women of Motherlines, warriors "who bred without men" (cover copy). Like male characters constructed in contrast to female ones, Amazons or Riding Women are constructed in contrast to the surrounding sexist society and its

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subjected women. More rarely, a female community may persecute men, although Motherlines makes it sound almost like justifiable homicide, if not good, clean fun: "What a perversity—a creature that would own her if she let i t . . . Men's only good feature was that they were a peerlessly clever and dangerous quarry to hunt . . . wild-eyed and bestial... in their final terror."31 In summary, mesotopian women exist "in the chinks of the male worldmachine." In masculinist dystopias women run communities, but they are incompetent and tyrannical and they dehumanize men. In feminist dystopias men run communities or whole worlds, but they are tyrannical, they dehumanize women, and they are all too competent at it. Feminist Utopian men are either under female control or living somewhere else; occasionally both. Feminist Utopian women escape the company of men and organize themselves in agrarian or warrior households. This subgenre is largely about how women could negotiate all the complex paths of life and juggle all its tasks, if only men wouldn't interfere. This is a strange concept of liberation or fulfillment. Some might call it servitude. One does not see men fantasizing escape from women in order to form primary care-giving, child-raising, collective households where men do it all. Men are no fools. The Things Women Don't Say What is missing from this picture? At the heart of it is an open secret: the things writers don't say, not even women, not even in feminist science fiction. Marge Piercy's He, She, and It perhaps comes closest. Our first clue that this is a woman's romance story is the romance triangle: boy, girl, house. No matter that it is an AI (Artificial Intelligence) house; for the boy is an AI boy. The house is a character ("she felt as if the personality of the house . . . were real" [89]), who does housework and child care, who serves and protects and learns to treat a male-form cyborg with due care and respect. House: "Welcome, Shira. What is the mechanism with you?" Shira: "It's a cyborg named Yod. You are to treat it as a person. Protect it" (89). Yod, in turn, comes to regard himself as a person and his safety, feelings, and dignity as important. Similarly, a character in Star Trek: Voyager tells an alien that there is one robot in the Federation with intelligence who "is treated like a person,"32 the male-form robot Data. The Positronic Man, male-form robot and title character of a novel by Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg, spends the entire book establishing his right to be a person in the eyes of the law.33 Compare Yod and these other self-aware, male-form robots to the title character of Lester del Rey's "Helen O'Loy," "a dream in spun plastics and metals," built with emotions so she would be a more efficient housekeeper than the simpler robot she replaces. Helen falls in love with Dave, her owner, who soon forgets that she isn't human. The only issue even remotely connected with her personal status in society hinges on which guy gets her, Dave or his narrator friend. When Helen marries Dave, "No woman ever made a lovelier bride or a sweeter wife," and she


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"never lost her flare for cooking and making a home." No strivings for selfawareness here; when Dave dies, Helen quietly destroys herself. Yod is superficially similar to Helen O'Loy. Created for a utilitarian purpose, he is a complex being, built with emotions so it/he will be a better instrument of community protection than the simpler cyborg it/he replaces. Yod echoes the golem theme, which is interwoven throughout the book. This is a theme of protection and safety. According to the golem story, Rabbi Loew in sixteenth-century Prague created Joseph, a being from clay, to protect local Jews from anti-Semitic terrorism. When he wasn't out protecting and defending, Joseph did household chores for the rabbi. Yod is created from human tissue and artificial materials to protect the town of Tikvah ("hope" in Hebrew) from the corporate (not necessarily anti-Semitic) marauders that plague North America. Yod, being American and, we observe, somewhat more macho than the Golem of Prague, does not do housework. Instead, he graduates to being the ideal lover for heroine and co-creator Shira (see Appendix). Yod and Shira fall in love. Far from killing himself as Helen did, Yod tries to stay alive, but in vain. Grieving, Shira agonizes over whether it is right to create another cyborg to serve her emotional needs. Deciding that to use a thinking, feeling being this way is wrong, she destroys the instructions. One is reminded of Tasha Yar of Star Trek: The Next Generation telling the android Data, after they make love, "It never happened."35 An android or cyborg can be a woman's perfect lover, but she has to give it/him up—forever. In short, female characters can do entirely or almost entirely without men; they can persecute men; they can rebel against men who persecute them. They can create male-form robots to serve social needs (Shira's cyborg protecting the town of Tikvah) or business (Susan Calvin's robots, sold and leased by United States Robots and Mechanical Men [The Positronic Man]). What is missing is the mirror image of the pervasive male fantasy of an ideal female help-meet. The happy, devoted, male partner serving a woman freed from housework and child care is missing. In fact, so is the happy devoted AI help-meet, except for rare, fleeting glimpses. No woman character has a Helen O'Loy in male form. A woman's ideal fantasy life, complete with obsessively devoted lover, occurs in romance novels (although always against a background of patriarchal society). However, in the more constricted worlds of science fiction and fantasy—even in feminist Utopias—it is wrong; it is impossible; it never happened. We destroy the instructions. Conclusion The average American, if magically transported to the universe of most science fiction stories—feminist stories included—would find the gender aspects of life quite familiar. Science fiction has yet to fulfill the promises implicit in the words of the genre's great definers: Samuel R. Delany's formulation of science fiction as

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a literature of "other landscapes"; Theodore Sturgeon's prescription, "always ask the next question"; Robert A. Heinlein's prompt for developing science fiction ideas: "Ask, 'What if this goes on?' " Asimov's jest that reality is an escape for those who can't face science fiction implies that science fiction should be outrageous. Perhaps a science fiction story should test whether the reader is man enough, or woman enough, to deal with the imaginary landscape generated when we ask the next question, and the next. And what if this questioning about gender goes on? And why have so few questions been asked? One has to wonder why science fiction and fantasy remain shackled by assumptions that men are already all they can be and that gender arrangements are immutable. In real life, great courage is needed merely to suggest equality; but in science fiction and fantasy, where one might safely suggest equality and sometimes more, we do not encounter even the suggestions that women can run things their own way and men would like it, or that men might routinely and contentedly cater to women. Not even cyborgs or androids do this. Romance novels flirt with these notions by creating fantasy heroes for the heroines; fan fiction flees the notion by focusing on male pairs; He, She, and It, written by an author outside the science fiction community, at least explores the idea, even if it pulls back, disapproving, at the last moment; but science fiction and fantasy authors, by and large, simply fail to explore. Even in feminist modes, female characters adapt to patriarchy, struggle against it, or escape it. The dance may look feminist, but the music comes from the masculinist agenda; there is little room for women where men are having adventures or fun. It does seem odd that fantasy writers do not invent men who adapt to women's lives. Surely science fiction can imagine societies in which men are valued according to how well they protect women from the irksome domesticities. Speculative fiction might, conceivably, speculate that a real man is a stand-by-your-woman man, devotedly running her home and happily raising her children. Frances Bartkowski notes that "to assume the tendentious voice of Utopian projection takes a certain amount of confidence and a sense of power to imagine collective change."36 If female authors are too enmeshed in the masculinist agenda, perhaps a male author may someday show the real work of the world as whatever women do, and the proper, fulfilling role of men as contented, receptive helpmeets behind the scenes. Of course, fictional revenge can be tun, but surely hunting male characters down like wild-eyed beasts cannot be the ultimate pleasure one can imagine in fictional male-female relations. And God save us, every one, from agrarian, domesticityfraught, child-raising collectives—now and in the hour of our escape fantasies. Appendix Yod's persona as Shira's lover, in He, She, and It (131) is passionate yet compliant; he has "feminine" qualities common in contemporary romance heroes (being


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relationship oriented, obsessed with love, gentle, etc.), although not to the extreme. Here Yod appears as Helen O'Loy's 1990s male counterpart: He stepped in front of her. He bent forward and laid his hand gently along her cheek, fingers spread. Lightly, barely perceptible, his fingers explored from cheekbone to chin. Unbelievably, she felt a stir of response. . . . She stepped back, jerking away . . . . "You can always trust me." He dropped his hand and retreated a step, clasping his hands behind his back. "I obey." He took hold of the doorknob and then, with a twitch, he crushed it. Slowly he entered, stopping to glance back at her where she stood under the maple . . . . [Later] He concentrated on her with a total intensity that in itself was absolutely exciting. It . . . was a passionately intense attention, sharpened by extraordinary skill in the use of his hands and mouth. (131, 169) Shira gets the benefits a man might expect from love: "Making love with Yod made her feel strong" (322). Unlike Dave with Helen O'Loy, however, Shira never forgets what Yod is: "Sometimes his behavior was what she thought of as feminine; sometimes it seemed neutral, mechanical, purely logical" (321).

Notes 1. Robin Roberts, A New Species: Gender and Science in Science Fiction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 93. Later page references in the text and notes are to this edition. 2. Catherine A. MacKinnon, "Difference and Dominance: On Sex Discrimination," in MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 36. 3. Marion Zimmer Bradley, "Introduction," Sword and Sorcery III: An Anthology of Heroic Fantasy (New York: DAW Books, 1986), 8. 4. According to Robin Roberts, "Carol Farley Kessler discovered that, 'Typically, women [Utopian writers] make issues of family, sexuality, and marriage more central than do men' " (67). 5. See Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (1966; New York: Stein and Day, 1982), and John Cawelti, The Six-Gun Mystique (Bowling Green: Bowling Green University Press, 1978), on American buddy fiction on the Western frontier. 6. For one rare exception to this, see Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars (New York: Bantam Books, 1993). 7. Pamela Sargent, "Introduction: Women and Science Fiction," Women of Wonder: Science Fiction Stories by Women about Women (New York: Vintage Books, 1975), xx. We can trace these matriarchies to the 1800s, the time, according to Roberts, of the "greatest number of Utopian fictions." Roberts characterizes the all-female Utopias then as "far from feminist, in that they tended to idealize the 'true' woman of the domestic sphere, not the 'new' woman" (7, 9). 8. Jeffrey Kooistra, "Romantic Ideals," Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, 114 (February 1994), 14. In two other 1994 short stories, one female e-mail user dies on-line, murdered, while another fades away from a wasting disease but is succeeded in her correspondents' lives by an ingenious program she designed to generate supportive conversation. In Brian Aldiss's "The God Who Slept with Women," Asimov's Science

48 Scien Ficton, Canoizaton, Marginlzation


Fiction, 20 (May 1994), 136-64, the narrative function of the thirteen-year-old girl protagonist is to gestate and bear a god. 9. Radical solutions are toyed with. In Marge Piercy's He, She, and It (New York: Ballantine Books, 1991), as will be discussed, the heroine has a devoted cyborg lover. Later page references to the novel in the text are to this edition. 10. Susan Kray, "Deconstructive Laughter: Romance Author as Subject and the Pleasure of Writing the Text," Journal of Communication Inquiry, 11:2 (1987), 26-46. 11. Consider this exchange between a fifty-two-year-old heroine and her grown daughter in Phoebe Conn's Tangled Hearts (New York: Zebra Books, 1993): "There's no longer any reason, and perhaps there never was one, to listen to what a woman should or should not do . . . . if you want to become a doctor . . . . I'll do whatever I can. . . ." "Thanks, Mom, I knew I could count on you . . . ." (363) Or this, also in Conn: "a lifelong bachelor might want a woman who would stay home and dote on him. Still, she had to tell him her feelings, not just what she believed he might want to hear" (389). Or this exchange between a forty-seven-year-old heroine and her mother in Martha Gross's One Kiss (New York: Zebra Books, 1993): "I want to be monogamous, too, Mother. I think "Well . . . there's nothing wrong in doing a little research and getting some experience. . . ." (437-38) 12. Victor Shklovsky, "Art as Technique" (1917), in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, ed. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), 13. 13. Gross, 436. Suzy McKee Charnas's Motherlines (New York: Berkley, 1978) defamili arizes men's anatomy—"his sexual organs had seemed a ludicrous, dangling nuisance"—but describes them in terms, from our own society, of man as rapist—"and hardly capable of the brutalities recounted by escaped femmish slaves" (9). 14. Gross, 436-37. 15. Martha Schroeder, The Law of Love (New York: Zebra Books, 1994), 137. 16. See Janice Radway's Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984) and her "Identifying Ideological Seams: Mass Culture, Analytical Method, and Political Practice," Communication, 9 (1986), 93-123. 17. This genre includes so-called "slash," an explicitly pornographic subgenre. The term "slash" is drawn from the typographical mark separating two names, as in Kirk/Spock. 18. All are based on television series, most of them science fiction or fantasy. Examples besides Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation have included Beauty and the Beast, Blake's 7, Starsky and Hutch, and The Pros (a British law-enforcement adventure series). However, a large proportion is based on Star Trek, with the relationship between Spock and Kirk predominating. 19. They are not generally professional writers, though they are usually college educated. A few, like Mercedes Lackey, move from fan writing to careers as science fiction or fantasy authors. 20. As noted in Camille Bacon-Smith's Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992). Fan


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fiction based the television series Beauty and the Beast is unusual in featuring a male/female relationship. 21. Kray, field work, 1987-1991. 22. Having been abandoned by Spock, T'Pring maneuvers him into ritual combat with Kirk so she can escape marrying him. That was the series version; in fan fiction she is up to even less good. 23. See Bacon-Smith. 24. See Fiedler. 25. Beauty and the Beast is an exception, but that program was promoted as a fantasy— not science fiction—and as a romance. 26. See Kray. 27. One observer says that cities are not a place where women have felt safe. Women rarely escape human society altogether as in James P. Tiptree, Jr.'s "The Women Men Don't See" (in Sargent, The New Women of Wonder: Recent Science Fiction Stories by Women about Women [New York: Vintage Books, 1978], 176-217; story originally published 1973); even there, they escape as a pair. 28. Do not think about a spiritual life, either: "No ferns ever went to Endpath [life after death]. They had no souls . . . . Their deaths had no significance" (Charnas, Walk to the End of the World [New York: Berkley Books, 1974], 64). 29. Also see Sargent's "Introduction," especially pp. xlix-liv, on female-dominated societies in science fiction since the 1890s. 30. Tiptree, 204-5. 31. Charnas, Motherlines, 9. 32. "Prototype," episode of Star Trek: Voyager (New York: UPN, January 21, 1996). 33. Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg, The Positronic Man (New York: Doubleday, 1993). 34. Lester del Rey, "Helen O'Loy," in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume 1: The Greatest Science Fiction Stories of All Time, ed. Robert Silverberg (New York: Avon Books, 1970), 62, 72. Story originally published in 1938. 35. "The Naked Now," Star Trek: The Next Generation (Syndicated: Paramount, October 3, 1987). 36. Frances Bartkowski, Feminist Utopias (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 9.


Chapter 5

Why the Academy Is Afraid of Dragons: The Suppression of the Marvelous in Theories of the Fantastic Jonathan Langford

The last thirty years have witnessed an unprecedented validation of the fantastic as a category in literary theory. Since publication of Tzvetan Todorov's The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre in 1970, and its translation into English in 1973, many studies have sought to apply Todorov's definitions, modify them, create their own competing theories, or analyze the use of the fantastic in specific works and genres—including the Gothic, Romantic fiction, horror, postmodern fiction, science fiction, and fantasy. The fantastic is now a recognized critical term, with its own authorities, standard lines of argument, and entries in handbooks of critical terminology. One irony in this increasing critical acceptance, however, is that although it seems to have finally created a solid theoretical base for criticism of fantasy, the overall effect has actually been to perpetuate the exclusion of certain types of the fantastic (here defined broadly as any violations of consensus reality in a literary work1) from serious critical consideration. Studies of the fantastic have tended to emphasize its disruptive, even subversive, effects on perceptions of external reality, internal psychic states, and even the status of the narrative: as the entry on the "Fantastic" in one critical dictionary states, "It is characteristic of'the fantastic text that the reader is made unsure how to interpret and respond to the events narrated."2 It follows that works in which the fantastic element fails to create a disruptive effect—including works of modern genre fantasy, fairy tales, and romances from almost every period—are classified either as "not really" fantastic (as in the reference cited, which specifies that "Works offantasy, such as J. R. R. Tolkien's fiction and C. S. Lewis's Narnia series" fail to fall into the category of the fantastic because "The reader is invited to feel not bewilderment at but respect for the order of the 'supernatural world' "3) or as, at best, second-class members that fall short of what the fantastic is expected to accomplish. Even critics such as Eric S. Rabkin, with clear ties to modern fantasy, use definitions that valorize the disturbing cognitive effects of the fantastic, so that they must contrive expediencies to defend

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fantastic works where the effect is comforting or consoling, inspiring awe or wonder rather than unease and confusion. Others, such as Rosemary Jackson and Christine Brooke-Rose, seem to regard Tolkien and other modern fantasists only as incompetent impostors with whom it is their unpleasant task to deal before moving on to genuine objects of interest. Anxious to claim theoretical relevance for their own projects, these critics have been even quicker than many "mainstream" theorists to dismiss such uses of the fantastic as uninteresting or escapist—a kind of critical fratricide that makes looking at such writing seriously all the more difficult. What has been excluded from critical discussion is a dimension of the fantastic that falls into the category of the marvelous: instances of the fantastic, or irruptions of the impossible or irrational into a literary text, in which nevertheless, due to the overt otherworldliness of their setting, adherence to a familiar "magical" or literary pattern, acceptance by characters in the story, or some other factor lead to a positive reaction on the part of readers, an evocation of what has sometimes been described as a "sense of wonder." It is the presence of the marvelous, for example, that lies behind Tolkien's fourfold justification of the fairy story (fantasy, recovery, escape, consolation) and behind much of the Renaissance debate over the validity of Ariosto's verse epic. It is used by Todorov as one of the two genres that lie off to the sides of the fantastic. I will discuss the place of the marvelous in theories of the fantastic, attempting to define some issues that are raised by consideration of the marvelous as a critical category. I will conclude with a summary of some advantages that follow from the use of the marvelous in literature and from its acknowledgment as a separate, but equally valid, manifestation of the fantastic— one which deserves its own critical apparatus and procedures, rather than the theoretical hand-me-downs with which it has all too often had to make do.

Todorov's Fantastic The fantastic, according to Todorov, consists of "that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event." It is marked by three prime characteristics or conditions: First, the text must oblige the reader to consider the world of the characters as a world of living persons and to hesitate between a natural and a supernatural explanation of the events described. Second, this hesitation may also be experienced by a character; thus the reader's role is so to speak entrusted to a character, and at the same time the hesitation is represented, it becomes one of the themes of the work . . . . Third, the reader must adopt a certain attitude with regard to the text: he will reject allegorical as well as "poetic" interpretations.4 More narrowly, the fantastic is not an element appearing in literary works but a genre, and one which, according to him, flourished only for about a hundred years, from the eighteenth century (Cazotte) to Maupassant (166)—a limitation rejected even by those, such as Brooke-Rose, who otherwise accept his definition as more

Langford: The Suppression of the Marvelous

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or less useful.5 Only texts such as Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, which maintain the hesitation between natural and supernatural explanations to the very end of the story qualify as truly fantastic; those that ultimately opt for the natural explanations are uncanny, while those that accept or require a supernatural explanation are marvelous. Clearly, Todorov's definition of the marvelous differs from the one I outlined above, in that it includes all manifestations of the supernatural that are accepted as such regardless of their effect on the reader, whether positive or disquieting. In another sense, the marvelous as generally used is arguably excluded entirely from Todorov's discussion by his first condition, that the world must be considered "a world of living persons" rather than an imaginary universe, which is the stance generally taken by modern fantasy writers (and implicitly by medieval romance and fairy tale writers) in presenting impossible tales and settings—a difference Todorov seems to acknowledge elsewhere in his offhand comment that "The marvelous implies that we are plunged into a world whose laws are totally different from what they are in our own" (172). Despite such problems of definition, Todorov's discussion of the marvelous is interesting, if frustratingly fragmentary. He observes that in its pure state, the marvelous generally "provoke[s] no particular reaction in either the characters or in the implicit reader" and briefly describes four types of quasi-marvelous "in which the supernatural is somewhat justified" (54): the hyperbolic marvelous, created by exaggeration; the exotic marvelous, which takes place in a far land; the instrumental marvelous, which uses devices we are now able to duplicate, though these are "unrealized in the period described" (55); and the scientific marvelous, or science fiction. This brief analysis could profitably be extended into a more thoroughgoing study of the ways in which texts justify and mitigate their uses of the supernatural, bringing them into the realm of the marvelous as I describe it; this, however, is an element of Todorov's theory that subsequent critics have not taken up. Todorov's discussion of themes of the fantastic seems to open up similar possibilities; since, for him, "the distinction between the fantastic and the marvelous is no longer of interest" at this point (103), his analysis of themes of the self and themes of the other presumably holds true for both genres. Todorov's apparent entrance into a criticism of the marvelous with this statement has disturbing implications, however: the marvelous is both excluded from the most powerful effect of the fantastic (its creation of uncertainty within the reader) and confined to the fantastic's thematic categories, an exercise of critical imperialism in which an entire literary category is denied both the validity of the master category and the capacity to say anything new for itself. Instead, the problem of identifying and classifying themes of the marvelous, while related to Todorov's analysis of the fantastic, needs its own tools, developed with an awareness of the elements that make it distinct and different from Todorov's typology of hesitation.

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Rabkin's Fantastic Eric Rabkin seems to avoid some of the problems in Todorov's definition by describing the fantastic as a literary element found within a wide variety of genres, one defined "not in relation to external norms, but rather in relation to microcontextual variations"—that is, expectations created by the narrative itself.6 Thus, "The truly fantastic occurs when the ground rules of a narrative are forced to make a 180-degree reversal, when prevailing perspectives are directly contradicted. This is true, even if the effect lasts only a moment. . . whether the reversal occurs in a Fantasy or not" (12). Central works of the fantastic—which he defines as Fantasy (as opposed to Tolkienesque fairy tales, where "everything happens according to rule" [35])—thus include texts such as Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, where ground rules are reversed not once but repeatedly and the ultimate effect is to provoke us to think upon ideas of order itself and achieve the "wonderful, exhilarating, therapeutic" recognition that "beliefs, even beliefs about Reality, are arbitrary" (218). The ultimate value of the fantastic is to cause a cognitive shift in our belief systems, leading to a certain kind of conclusion about the world we live in and the ways we try to make order about it. Yet Rabkin has difficulty extending this definition to the marvelous, or the type of fantastic found in genres such as the fairy tale, in which the effect may be "wonderful, exhilarating, therapeutic" but is not linked to a destabilizing of our perceptions about the "real" world. In an apparent attempt to avoid this difficulty while including these types of literature in his analysis, he reintroduces Todorov's relation of the fantastic to the status of things in the real world: "The escape offered by these popular genres [pornography, Westerns, science fiction, fairy tales read by adults, etc.] comes from their ability to exchange the confining ground rules of the extra-textual world not for chaos but for a diametrically opposed set of ground rules that define fantastic worlds" (44). The value of the fantastic in such narratives consists of an escape from responsibility which is also, in many cases, a "consoling" escape to order, away from the chaos and indeterminacy of the world which readers ordinarily inhabit. This attempt to include the marvelous involves a shifting of not only Rabkin's basic definition (the fantastic as the reversal of expectations created by the text) but also his grounds for defense of the fantastic: in this case, the return to order is valued, while in all other cases it is the disruption of order that is important. In addition to its theoretical problems, this strategy places the marvelous in the doubly unfortunate rhetorical position of sharing its analytical space with non-marvelous genres like pornography and the Western, within a chapter that is largely unrelated to the arguments developed in the rest of the book. This relegation, however, follows naturally from Rabkin's approach to the fantastic as a spectrum along which works can be placed according to the degree of reversal they feature, without any regard to the quality of that reversal. The very flexibility of the concept of reversal, which as developed by Rabkin can apply to character expectations, reader experience of the primary world, generic conventions, or worldview, obscures the


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element of unreality which, in common usage, is central to the concept of the fantastic, and the related question of why the unreal can rouse such deeply different responses in different works and contexts. Despite their differences, both Todorov and Rabkin thus ultimately emphasize a fantastic whose chief characteristics include a sustained confusion in the minds of readers, such that their perceptions regarding the narrative world remain in a state of perpetual flux. The apparent reliance by both critics on structural principles as a basis for definition is thus quickly compromised, as readers' perceptions and judgments become the standard against which the reversal of expectations or hesitation is to be measured. For Todorov, the genre of the fantastic expressed psychological states (necrophilia, madness, etc.) which could not at the time be described directly, and so required a literary expression—one which is no longer possible, in part because we now have psychoanalysis to say such things directly for us. For Rabkin, the fantastic reveals the underlying arbitrariness of our perceptions of order in the universe—that it in fact has no order aside from what we impose on it. In both cases, the value of the fantastic lies primarily in its disruptive effect. The marvelous, in contrast, is tied not to disruption but, most often, to the creation of some kind of system which, while admittedly fictive and different from the worldas-it-is, nonetheless presents an alternative to the world consisting not of chaos but of order. Regarding this element of order within the fantastic, Rabkin's treatment is less satisfactory than Todorov's, since although Todorov nowhere defines the supernatural but treats it as a transparent term, he does present a theory of sources for the disruptions caused by the fantastic, implying some sort of order existing outside the text which gives meaning to the apparent disruptions of order within it— in this case, an order based on inner psychological states that follow scientifically understandable rules. Rabkin, on the other hand, treats the process of reversal as a possibility inherent in the system of order being reversed, thereby ignoring the problem of the source of the fantastic reversal. By now, however, the idea that systems can be destabilized or critiqued from a position outside any system has been largely discredited, while the sheer number and variety of directions from which such reversals can be accomplished suggest that the operation of fantastic reversal is not nearly as transparent or self-contained as it here appears. A more fruitful approach might be to see the fantastic as marking the presence of competing systems, rather than the breakdown of one hegemonic, rationalistic worldview—a perspective that would be particularly appropriate for the marvelous because of its connections with a variety of competing but (in many cases) highly formalized systems of causality, but one which could fruitfully be extended to other types of the fantastic as well. I suggest this example in part because it illustrates the kind of difference the marvelous can make to critical theory if it is considered as central to the project rather than, at best, an aberration to be explained away. This kind of criticism will not occur, however, so long as theorists are more interested in perpetuating the lower-class status of less "cognitively challenging" and more affective literary forms such as the fairy tale and Tolkienesque fantasy.

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Jackson's Fantastic One critic who excludes the marvelous on revealingly ideological grounds is Rosemary Jackson, whose Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion uses an adapted Marxist feminist version of Todorov's system to define the fantastic as an intermediate mode "Between the marvellous and the mimetic": "borrowing the extravagance of one and the ordinariness of the other, the fantastic belongs to neither and is without their assumptions of confidence or presentations of authoritative 'truths.' " Instead, it "enters a dialogue with the 'real' and incorporates that dialogue as part of its essential structure." The value of the fantastic thus lies in its ability to disrupt set patriarchal and class assumptions by expressing transgressive desire—unlike the marvelous, which, as expressed by such writers as Charles Kingsley and Tolkien, "move[s] away from the unsettling implications which are found at the centre of the purely 'fantastic' [These writers'] original impulse may be similar, but they move from it, expelling their desire and frequently displacing it into religious longing and nostalgia. Thus they defuse potentially disturbing, anti-social drives and retreat from any profound confrontation with existential dis-ease" (9). The marvelous creates its own separate worlds, the mimetic faithfully portrays this one, and the fantastic "has to do with inverting elements of this world, re-combining its constitutive features in new relations to produce something strange, unfamiliar and apparently 'new,' absolutely 'other' and different" (8). Jackson, like Rabkin, sees the fantastic as important because it breaks down conventional systems. Unlike Rabkin, however, she focuses less on "playful" manifestations of the fantastic—as in Alice in Wonderland—and more on its disturbing dimension, what is commonly referred to as the uncanny. In so doing, she acknowledges the problem caused by the wide variation in possible responses to manifestations of the unreal, and makes it central to her analysis of specific works and categories of the fantastic. Her work also introduces an important social and ideological dimension into criticism of the fantastic, one missing, for example, in Todorov, who focuses only on individual psychology as a source of meaning for the fantastic. As with Todorov and Rabkin, however, her manner of dismissing the marvelous highlights problems in her argument. Tolkien, for instance, is criticized as betraying a nostalgia for the past and support for ruling ideologies, as evidenced in his move toward transcendence and dislike for "the physical and material" (156)—a pretty fundamental misreading of Tolkien, whose work actually includes a stringent critique of modern industrial practices, dehumanizing power structures, and the concept that individual good follows from blind obedience to the social order or adherence to some particular cause. On closer examination, one senses that what irritates Jackson, like other critics of Tolkien, is the fact that his writing subverts her own particular political agenda. Thus, as Brian Attebery comments, what Jackson really seems to mean is that "instead of criticizing the noise, pollution, dehumanization, destructiveness, and sheer ugliness of modern cities, which may be found in any social system, [Tolkien] should be attacking only those ills specific


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to capitalism." The actual relationship of the marvelous to ideologies of the past demands a more careful and sophisticated analysis than Jackson provides. The sense of comfort, consolation, and wonder connected with the marvelous does suggest a relationship with the familiar and known—a relationship borne out by a long history of evocations of the past in genres featuring the marvelous, whether a literal past (as popularly conceived) or the past of literary patterns, such as the heroic quest in modern fantasy or the conventions of courtly love in French chivalric romances. On the other hand, invocations of the past can be a powerful tool for critiquing the present, one that is all the more subversive as it appears in a familiar and nonthreatening guise. Rather than looking at the particulars of Tolkien's uses of the past and his reworkings of modern and medieval literary sources, however, Jackson looks no further than the fact that they are not wholly negative. For the fantastic writers Jackson favors, she focuses entirely on the cultural structures they subvert. For writers she disapproves of, she focuses on the ideologies they represent—not taking into account the fact that, as has been discussed, there is no such thing as a wholly negative or subversive (i.e., ideologically ungrounded) critique, but that literature critiques positions only from the perspective of other, simultaneously sustained positions. As a result, she ignores how the marvelous, despite an apparent acquiescence to the prejudices of its audience, can operate subversively. The value of the fantastic, according to Jackson's lexicon, is that it takes something that appears to be our world and introduces unreal elements into it, destabilizing what we thought we knew about the world. The overt admission of unreality made in most literature of the marvelous disables this strategy, but opens up ways for readers to experience imaginatively possibilities they would reject in realistic narrative. Where the fantastic foregrounds questions about the status of reality, the marvelous persuades readers to lay aside such issues on the (false) premise that what they consider in an imaginary world is without consequences for this one. In this way, it gets past cognitive barriers to the affective level where fiction operates most powerfully. This strategy is truly subversive, using the apparent conservatism of the marvelous as a mask behind which alternate ideologies can be advanced, rather than launching the kind of frontal assault on readers' sensibilities that Jackson apparently prefers: less dramatic, perhaps, but potentially more effective, on both the personal and political level. Whether such potentialities have in fact been utilized by writers of the marvelous is a question that remains unexamined by Jackson, because for her the possibilities do not exist—yet another example of the inability of criticism that dismisses the marvelous as a class to meaningfully address either its texts or its central generic issues.

Hume's Fantastic Perhaps the most all-encompassing definition of the fantastic is offered by Kathryn Hume's Fantasy and Mimesis, which seeks to redress critical inattention to what she

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sees as one of the two fundamental impulses—along with mimesis or imitation of reality—underlying all literature. Fantasy, which Hume defines as "any departure from consensus reality" (21; italics in original), arises out of "the desire to change givens and alter reality—out of boredom, play, vision, longing for something lacking, or need for metaphoric images that will bypass the audience's verbal defences . . . . Its manifestations in the text serve several purposes: relieving authorial tensions or giving voice to authorial vision; manipulating and releasing audience tensions; shocking, enchanting, and comforting" (20). Just as the mimetic impulse is tied to "the desire to imitate . . . with such verisimilitude that others can share your experience," the fantasy element in a work "helps activate whatever it is in our minds that gives us the sense that something is meaningful" (20). Hume's view of fantasy is thus less as a distinct genre than as an element that runs through every area of literature, and most of her book endeavors to demonstrate the omnipresence of fantasy in literature according to a variety of more or less traditional classification schemes. Thus, Hume describes the role of fantasy in the literatures of traditional, skeptical, and modern/postmodern societies; in the literature of illusion, vision, revision, and disillusion; in Northrop Frye's four mythoi and five modes; in literatures oriented toward action, character, and idea; and as an element that can be analyzed using Freudian, archetypal, and Gestalt psychological theory. Such a definition certainly includes room for the marvelous, and Hume makes use of a wide range of works including L. Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz, Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, the romances of Chretien de Troyes, The Turn of the Screw, and Thomas More's Utopia. However, despite this breadth of definition and the suggestiveness of Hume's identification of fantasy as the meaning-bearing element in literary works, there is relatively little here that is useful for a criticism of the marvelous in any but the most general terms. In part, this lack of usefulness stems from the arbitrary and conventional nature of the schemes Hume uses to structure her argument, as well as the broad range of the topic she has chosen to cover in a relatively brief work. For example, within Hume's single chapter on the literature of illusion, she discusses the pastoral, comic novel, detective story, thriller, pornography, and tales of conquest and adventure such as Alexander Dumas's The Three Musketeers, Baum's The Wizard of Oz, Robert A. Heinlein's Time Enough for Love, and Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings—all of which, Hume says, are similar in that they offer the consolation of escape from the real world, featuring "appeal to physical sensations and emotions rather than to the intellect [and a] portrayal of man freed from responsibilities and limitations" (79), a "blind, passive enjoyment [that] demands no obligation toward the source of the pleasurable stimulation" (81). Such a characterization seems woefully inadequate, as does Hume's curious statement (and frankly inaccurate, at least in the case of Tolkien) that "Readers of Lord of the Rings or Julian May's The Saga of the Exiles or Ann [sic] McCaffrey's Dragonworld series identify with the aristocratic Aragorn, or with the inner circle of humans who have developed metapsychic talents, or with the dragonriders, not


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with the untalented masses" (66). Readers of The Lord of the Rings actually will more likely identify with the more childlike Sam or Frodo than with Aragorn, making the tale less one of identification with a fantastic hero than a coming-of-age story. Hume, however, while dutifully citing Bruno Bettelheim on the value of fairy tales in socialization and Tolkien on the value of escape from the modern world, seems unaware of this interpretation. As a result, she fails to make of Tolkien's use of the fantastic anything more significant than readers' dubious identification with the larger-than-life hero Aragorn and a reference in passing to the "intriguing moral dimensions" of the ring of invisibility (80). Such an oversight constitutes a greater fault than may at first appear, compromising as it does Hume's analysis of the fantastic as a bearer of meaning in this work. Her discussion of the literature of illusion is intended to disprove the traditional critical equation of fantasy with escapism, first by arguing that not all fantasy is escapist, second by citing examples such as pornography to demonstrate that not all escape literature need be fantastic. In the process, though, she does an injustice to her topic by failing to follow through on the implications of escape and the role fantasy plays in such literature, while at the same time grouping together works that little resemble each other so that analysis is made more difficult, not less, by considering such works in relation to each other. Careful analysis of Tolkien might equally well have yielded a classification of his work as literature of vision, which "tries to get us to experience a new, more intense version of reality" (cf. Tolkien's idea of Recovery as a basic value of fantasy), or of revision, which "incites reform, and is based on some kind of transcendent, suprarational reality" (56). Its designation as literature of illusion, however, imposes a critical straight]'acket on Hume's analysis of the role of fantasy within the work and the range of possible meanings it bears, while the brevity of her discussion fails to mitigate the limitations of her categories with a more in-depth analysis. In short, Hume's description of the fantastic, though acknowledging a wide range of literary effects associated with its various forms, in practice offers few if any useful tools for making meaning of the marvelous.

Attebery's Fantastic If Todorov, Rabkin, Jackson, and Hume all represent theories of the fantastic that ultimately do little to advance the cause of the marvelous, Attebery's Strategies of Fantasy approaches the problem of the marvelous from another direction by examining modern genre fantasy. Describing Tolkien as the paradigmatic fantasy author, Attebery defines the genre as those works that resemble Tolkien in three ways: their content is impossible; their structure is comic, ending in a resolution that creates closure of the problem presented by the narrative; and the response they evoke in readers is one of wonder (14-15). In later chapters he uses the tools of postmodern criticism to explain how such works, especially from the generation of fantasy writers influenced by Tolkien, subvert traditional ideas of plot, character,

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and genre, and provide vehicles for female expression—all within, and indeed building on, the features of the genre as Attebery defines it. The centrality of the marvelous to Attebery's project is evident. His definition of fantasy as a conjunction of the impossible with a sense of wonder enabled by a comic structure reads almost like an alternate formulation of the marvelous as a category, though in this case tied to a specific period and literary tradition. Indeed, it is largely Attebery's interest in developing tools for studying a specific set of modern authors, rather than in pursuing larger questions of definition, that seems to prevent him from developing his own theory of the marvelous. This does not mean, however, that he neglects the topic entirely. Immediately after providing his definition of the fantasy genre in Chapter One, in part as "the set of texts that in some way or other resemble The Lord of the Rings" (14), he faces the challenge of demonstrating, and accounting for, the fact that critics such as Todorov, Jackson, and Brooke-Rose deal so poorly with Tolkien and Tolkienian texts. His answer is that on the linguistic level, Tolkienian fiction's approach to words is not Saussurean but philological, in which a word (e.g., "elf) becomes "the sum of all its forms and meanings and uses over time, insofar as those are recoverable through philological research" (28); that on the psychological level, the Tolkienian approach to character is to make the realistic figure the "deep structure" and the archetype the surface; and that on the social level, Tolkienian fiction is concerned with ecology rather than politics. In short, "By juxtaposing philology with linguistics, archetypes with Oedipal conflicts, and ecology with economic determinism, we see that a text like LOTR offers new perspective on literary theory itself. Theories like Marxist historicism, which do nothing with this text except proclaim its deficiencies, are shown thereby to be less universal than their practitioners are wont to claim" (334). Attebery's solution to this critical problem is to argue that what the fantasists are doing is in many ways similar to postmodern fiction, and that postmodernism therefore represents a more fruitful perspective from which to examine modern fantasy. This attempt, however, runs into difficulties, since Attebery is far too good a critic not to recognize the crucial differences between modern fantasy and postmodern fantastic fiction. For example, in discussing John Crowley's Little, Big, Attebery argues that the book is more satisfying than a similar postmodern text, since it does not "undercut [its] marvels with such devices as a sudden shift in tone, as if to say, 'We're all adults here and we don't really believe a horse can fly' " (45). This difference is highly significant, however, reflecting a fundamental incompatibility between typical postmodern irony and fantasy's evocation of wonder. Attebery's subsequent complaint that Crowley's work has failed to receive the critical attention of Mark Helprin's Winter's Tale, which to his mind attempted the same thing but less successfully, merely confirms that readers neither of postmodern fiction nor of modern fantasy are likely to see the two genres as attempting much the same thing, despite any number of structural similarities. It is precisely here that a theory of the marvelous, one senses, might serve Attebery better than his attempt to co-opt postmodernism for the fantasy cause—


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focusing, as such a theory inevitably would, on the ways literary works attempt to create and sustain belief, rather than undermining it, by using conventions, formulas, archetypes, and discredited patterns of belief and behavior from the past, in the face of contemporary, conventional ideas about the nature of reality. Attebery's description of the sense of wonder as "an alternative formulation of the idea of estrangement" which "requires the combination of the familiar and the impossible within the context of an affirming, reordering narrative" (16) demonstrates, as does his entire argument, that he is aware of this direction as implicit in his analysis. Certainly the question of how authors create and sustain this sense of wonder is important, tied as it is to the larger issue of narrative belief in all fiction. Yet Attebery does little to explore this point. As a result, his study is skewed toward the formalistic, even though he has made reader response central to his definition. He fails to compare his genre explicitly with others that afford the same quality of emotional reaction to the text, in the process replicating the common fallacy that equates fantasy with myth, despite the different qualities of belief involved. Similarly, Attebery's genealogy of modern fantasy as arising out of, and closely related to, an oral folk tradition bypasses a potentially fruitful use of the medieval romance as a highly sophisticated literary form coming from a time not at all similar to our own in terms of basic beliefs about the universe, yet similar to modern fantasy in its use of the marvelous and in the sense of wonder it is meant to inspire. An understanding of the marvelous as a particular way readers react to specific kinds of texts would help highlight such comparisons, providing, perhaps, a structure for examining modern fantasy that lives up to the potential Attebery claims for the genre in his description of a literature that "offers new perspective on literary theory itself." Conclusion For hundreds of years, much of our culture's most powerful and widely enjoyed literature has made extensive use of the marvelous. Since the rise of the novel in the eighteenth century, however, strong pressures have promoted the critical acceptability of more mimetic or "realistic" forms. Available theories of the fantastic, emphasizing the value of the unreal for a variety of literary and nonliterary purposes, seem to promise an increased critical respectability for such literature, along with more serious academic attention to its methods of shaping meaning. In general, however, these theories have failed in their promise, and a full-blown study of the marvelous as a critical category still remains to be made. Such a study, and a recognition of the validity of the marvelous in general, would have definite benefits. First, a theory of the marvelous would wean us from our persistent habits of realistic criticism and reclaim a large part of our literary inheritance. While many works on the fantastic begin with ritual denunciations of realism, remarkably many of them end, in essence, defending the fantastic because its orderlessness and

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disruption accurately reflect the way the universe "really is." In the process, they neglect the fact that the world of fiction—any world of fiction, though most noticeably in the case of the overtly marvelous—is distinguished from other modes of human modeling of the cosmos (science, philosophy, religion) precisely by the fact that its world is avowedly not that of the reader and writer. Granted there will inevitably be some mimetic content in such worlds, still that fact should not obscure the potent difference created by the belief that, in literature, what one is making or looking at need not coincide with things as they are normally experienced—a fact that is highlighted by the marvelous. Related to this is the value of recognizing fiction as not wholly a cognitive but at least as much an affective mode of experiencing the world, and of acknowledging that among the emotions literature can valuably provoke, comfort, consolation, and wonder are fully as valid as fear, horror, and unease. Disruptions of mental and emotional patterns have now become intellectually fashionable, and critics have flocked to the fantastic to view the spectacle of literature, like the literary pelican, stabbing itself to death with its own beak. Such critics react to the marvelous like spectators denied a promised show. Yet if humans are order-creating animals, it must be worthwhile at times to allow ourselves to engage in, even enjoy, such creation, rather than insist that all fictions devote themselves to their own undoing. Fictions must be allowed to rouse us, amuse us, excite or deeply move us (to paraphrase Tolkien), as well as lecturing us or disturbing our perceptions.9 By highlighting this issue, the marvelous again helps us reclaim a large portion of our literary heritage and advances the claim that works with an affirmative affect are worthy of serious, not merely condescending, critical attention. Finally, one other quality of the marvelous merits particular attention in light of its relevance to contemporary political and critical issues, and that is its attitude toward the other. One complaint against literature of the marvelous involves its frequent alignment of good and evil with particular races or cultures, so that the marvelous apparently fosters a totalizing, imperialistic attitude toward that which is different or alien. Underlying this argument is the idea that the ideologies of good and evil often used in such works stem from the dichotomy between the self, one's own group, and the other, the foreigner, the strange, so that any time the labels good and evil appear within a work or a worldview, veiled or overt aggression against the outsider is sure to follow. According to such a perspective, the "desire to converse with other living things" which, according to Tolkien, lies at the heart of much of the marvelous,10 is only a sham, masking an ideological imperialism. Aside from these political ramifications, there are significant questions about whether it is even possible to accomplish what the marvelous sets out to do: the genuinely other, the truly different, by definition cannot be expressed or explained in our language. Attempts to do so inevitably lead not only to acts of appropriation but to a narcissistic projection that ultimately has no more to do with any kind of otherness than the most provincially realistic of literary productions. Granted the importance of such arguments, they are not the entire story. At the least, such arguments are no more applicable to the marvelous than to other types


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of literature, or indeed to a wide range of vital human activities: every time we speak, we assume a kind of communion with the other that such theories would label as impossible, while despite our best efforts we seem unable to eradicate the categories of good and evil (though we change their labels). More to the point, even if we believe in the fictiveness of any world where conversation with others is truly possible, postmodern perceptions of the fictiveness of all worlds we inhabit require us to ask further questions about the desirability of such a world, rather than condemning it on the basis of an unavoidable, and therefore pointless, lack of reality. From this perspective, the great pragmatic value of the marvelous is that, unlike realistic literature, which attempts to show only the familiar, or the uncanny, which shows the different only as a source of disruption and fear, or the fantastic as narrowly described by Rabkin and others, which depicts the other but finds it without recognizable form or structure, the marvelous associates difference with the possibility of a meaningful and positive interaction, one which respects the principle of agency (sources of potential help, even in fairy stories, can become vindictive if forced) while holding out hope for unguessed-at gains if real communication can be established. The answer of the marvelous to the critical objections raised above is to posit an other which need not be appropriated because it can speak for itself. Thus, even though all efforts at understanding are fraught with difficulty and the certainty of frequent miscommunication, a fundamental faith in the process of communication underlies the depiction of the other in the marvelous. Given the state of today's world and the evident need to underline and reinforce, rather than deny, the possibility of positive communication with others, such a "marvelous" depiction of the interaction of self and other seems something much to be desired. Notes 1. See Kathryn Hume, Fantasy and Mimesis: Responses to Reality in Western Literature (New York: Methuen, 1984), xii. Later page references to Hume in the text are to this edition. 2. M. H. Parkinson, "Fantastic," ,4 Dictionary of Modern Critical Terms, Revised and Enlarged Edition, ed. Roger Fowler (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), 88. 3. Parkinson, 88. 4. Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard (Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1973), 25, 33. Later page references to Todorov in the text are to this edition. 5. See Christine Brooke-Rose, A Rhetoric of the Unreal: Studies in Narrative and Structure, Especially of the Fantastic (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 6. Eric S. Rabkin, The Fantastic in Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 188n. Later page references to Rabkin in the text are to this edition. 7. Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (New York: Methuen, 1981), 35-36 (italics in original). Later page references to Jackson in the text are to this edition. 8. Brian Attebery, Strategies of Fantasy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 21. Later page references to Attebery in the text are to this edition.

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9. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring (1954; New York: Ballantine Books, 1965), 10. 10. Tolkien, "On Fairy-Stories," in The Tolkien Reader (New York: Ballantine Books, 1966), 66. Essay based on a 1940 lecture expanded for publication in 1947 and again expanded in 1964.

Part II Mechanisms of Canonization


Chapter 6

The Arthur C. Clarke Award and Its Reception in Britain Edward James

The ultimate authority is the one who decides what language means, as George Orwell saw. In many cases, that authority is not the minority whose interests are wedded to a particular usage of language, but the general public who adopt that usage in daily discourse, or a socially or politically dominant group who are able to impose their own ideology upon the language. I am talking about the phrase "science fiction," of course, and how its meaning has been determined in the British context. To dramatize it, one might say that this chapter is about the struggle within the science fiction community, and between the science fiction community and the literary or intellectual community, for the right to define "science fiction" as it wishes. I will look in particular at the early stages of the Arthur C. Clarke Award, which was deliberately designed to give a higher profile to the genre of science fiction and to change public perception of it. But I shall begin with some thoughts on the way in which one might test the public usage of a phrase like "science fiction," and, more importantly, check the ways in which that usage changes over time. A series of opinion polls spread over a number of years might, at great expense, achieve this result; so would a laborious trawl through the press, popular or otherwise. But a new tool is now at our disposal for investigating matters such as this: the CD-ROM. I used the CD-ROMs containing the entire content of four upmarket British newspapers (the Times, Sunday Times, Independent, and Independent on Sunday) to look up all references to "science fiction," "sf' and "sci-fi" in the years 1992 and 1993. An initial impression, and hardly a surprising one, is that "science fiction" is much more likely to be used with positive connotations on the science or computer pages of a newspaper than it is on the book or film review pages, or in general news and editorial sections. In an article on mobile telecommunications in the Independent, for instance, Steve Homer wrote that "Science fiction should become science fact before the end of this decade."1 That remark, or variations of it, is common enough on the science pages (as it has been ever since World War II, if not earlier): science fiction is viewed, in

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journalistic copy, as the science fact of the future. Hugo Gernsback and John W. Campbell, Jr., America's two greatest science-fiction missionaries, would clearly have approved. William Gibson—the sf author who cropped up in these newspapers more than any other—has given the theme of science fiction writer as prophet a new and up-to-date resonance. It is interesting to note that "cyberpunk" and "cyberspace," two words which he has given such wide currency to, can be treated in totally different ways in different sections of the same newspaper: on the computer page they hardly need explanation, presumably because every computer buff has read Neuromancer, while on the reviews page Gibson needs to be explained, and is treated rather as a cultural guru than as a science fiction author. "Cyberpunk" seems in mediaspeak to be "good," while science fiction is "bad." Rosemary Bailey writes in the Independent that "Cyberpunk differs from mainstream SF in that it is horribly plausible":2 clearly mainstream sf which some may regard as a contradiction of terms is not generally plausible. When "science fiction" itself is mentioned outside the science pages, however, it is almost invariably in disparaging terms. "Studying the future does not have to mean science fiction, guesswork or utopianism," said a review in the Sunday Times? "The subject matter is often very serious, albeit dressed in science fiction trappings," said Patrick Stewart (Jean-Luc Picard), defending Star Trek against its critics in the Times, and implying by his "albeit" that science fiction itself has little serious to offer.4 Sometimes science fiction is equated with fantasy, or even lying: former Chancellor of the Exchequer Norman Lamont, writing about a journalist's assessment of one of his most conspicuous economic failures, wrote in the Sunday Times that "Junor's version of Black Wednesday is complete science fiction."5 And sometimes it seems to be misused completely: the headline to an article in the Sunday Times proclaims, "Heather Couper bewails the gap between science fiction and science fact,"6 but she does not in fact do so in the article. Indeed, she does not mention "science fiction" once. Couper, an academic astronomer who has become a television personality, is actually bewailing the popularity of astrology, which the headline writer is clearly equating with science fiction. I shall not here go into the question of the usage of the word "sci-fi," save to note that, again as one might expect, it seemed to be used particularly of media and film sf, and to be predominantly a disparaging or condescending word. Those who read and love science fiction, of course, have never been happy with the public image of the genre. Not all have a missionary zeal to bring science fiction to the world, though most have found themselves in the position of trying to explain their passion to a skeptical friend, relative or spouse, in the process trying to counter prevalent impressions of the genre. There have been several attempts in Britain to do that publicly: Kingsley Amis and C. S. Lewis, for instance, both endeavored to make science fiction if not acceptable, then at least comprehensible, to a wider audience. But my main theme is one more attempt to raise the profile of science fiction and give it a more favorable public image. This began in 1986, when Arthur C. Clarke—well known to the British public not just as a best-selling science fiction author but also as a popularizer of science and presenter of television programs—

James: The Arthur C. Clarke Award

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was persuaded to give his name, and his money, to create the Arthur C. Clarke Award. The award was to be given annually, in March or April, to the best science fiction novel published in Britain in the previous year. The money was £1,000 for the author, plus some money for expenses to the committee which was selecting the novel. This is not a huge sum of money compared, say, to the £15,000 for the Booker Prize, Britain's leading literary prize; but it is one of the few sf awards with money attached, and it is put into context if one realizes that a British author cannot expect to earn much more than twice this from a first edition hardback sf novel. The initiative came from the Council of the Science Fiction Foundation, an institution established in 1971 precisely for the purpose of educating the public about science fiction; in particular, the initiative came from George Hay, the founder of the Science Fiction Foundation, and someone with a zeal for the cause of science fiction that his hero Campbell would have admired. The Clarke Award was intended to bring sf to the attention of the public and point them in the direction of the best science fiction. There lay the problem; how was the best science fiction to be defined? Indeed, how was science fiction to be defined? It cannot be said that this was perceived to be an issue when the Award was first discussed. It was, perhaps, tacitly assumed that the judges should do the defining as well as the selecting. It was agreed, early on, that there should normally be six judges. Two were to be appointed by the Science Fiction Foundation from its own membership, a relatively small group of people, comprising sf authors, critics, and editors, a very small number of sf academics (since sf is very much marginalized by the university system in Britain), and a number of interested parties from the North-East London Polytechnic (now the University of East London), then the home of the Foundation. Two were to be appointed by the British Science Fiction Association, the central organization for sf fandom in Britain; and two were to be appointed by the International Science Policy Foundation, a somewhat mysterious organization run by Dr. Maurice Goldsmith, to which both Clarke and George Hay were loosely connected. Already the seeds of future problems were sown, in the sense that George Hay himself saw the award as a way to validate science fiction as a tool of science and science education in particular, while others saw it as a way to raise the profile of sf in the literary world, or as a way of counterbalancing the plethora of American awards, the Hugo, the Nebula, the John W. Campbell, the Philip K. Dick, all of which went almost invariably to American writers rather than to British ones. That introduces what became another cause of contention: the Arthur C. Clarke Award was not intended to be restricted to British writers, but many have thought that it should have been, or even that it was. As of 2000, the Award has in fact gone to two Canadians, six Americans (one of them twice), one Australian, and just five Brits: Colin Greenland (1992, Take Back Plenty), Jeff Noon (1994, Vurt), Paul J. McAuley (1996, Fairyland), Tricia Sullivan (1999, Dreaming in Smoke), and China Mieville (2000, Perdido Street Station). At this point I ought to admit my own part in this and say that I was one of the judges for the first two years, representing the Science Fiction Foundation, and also acted as Administrator of the Arthur C. Clarke Award for those two years,

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contacting publishers, attempting to arrange publicity, and liaising with the other judges. The task of Administrator was taken on subsequently by Maxim Jakubowski, sf author, editor, and bookseller, and David V. Barrett, sf author, critic, and journalist. I will not reveal the reasons judges came to their decisions, nor the debates and disagreements that lay behind the decisions; there are no hitherto unpublished revelations here. But it would be reasonable to take the first year of the award as an example of the dilemmas placed before the judges. Should the Award go to British writers as a matter of principle, to encourage them and stave off bankruptcy? How should the judges distinguish between fantasy and science fiction? (In 1993 there was a minor public row when the judges decided to exclude Karen Joy Fowler's Sarah Canary on the grounds that it was fantasy; more than one person thought that she should have won the award.) Should the Award go to a work which the judges recognize to be solidly within the science fiction tradition, which would no doubt be applauded by sf fans, but be received blankly by an uninterested world? Or should the Award associate itself with a work which the outside world would actually recognize, to increase the standing of science fiction by hanging on the coat-tails of recognized Literature? There were of course attempts to judge purely on quality, without entering into these political questions. But quality is a subjective term, the more so when there are different conceptions of what a "good" science fiction novel would look like, and decisions like this will inevitably have political ramifications. Personally I thought the best science fiction book published in 1986, the first year judged for the Award, was Samuel R. Delany's Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, still one of my favorite sf novels. I was outvoted, and the panel selected a book that was not one of the sixty or so books submitted to the panel by publishers, but one solicited from the publishers at the last minute on the insistence of one judge: Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. It was, most will allow, a very good book, but it was not an auspicious start to the Award. The publishers, Faber and Faber, had not published it as science fiction and did not wish to publicize the book as science fiction by proclaiming it to be the first winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award. The author herself denied that it was science fiction and expressed her displeasure at the Award by allowing it to be presented during a subsequent London visit—at a public reading—in a way that showed she thought it quite unimportant, or even insulting to her. Sf fans did not like it either: some of them had almost as much difficulty in believing that The Handmaid's Tale was really sf as did Faber and Faber, though for different reasons. Sf fandom in Britain has a long tradition of resenting mainstream writers who go slumming in the sf universe and frequently misread the jargon or recycle tired themes without realizing they are doing it. The first Award attracted very little publicity, partly because it was the first year and such things take some time to get known, partly no doubt because of my own deficiencies as a publicist, but also because in a sense, in retrospect, The Handmaid's Tale was clearly the wrong book. The award to The Handmaid's Tale did nothing to present science fiction to the British public because they did not recognize it to be science fiction. I remember


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spending most of a dinner party trying to explain to an incredulous colleague, a distinguished feminist critic in the Department of English at York, why The Handmaid's Tale, which she greatly admired, should perhaps be regarded as science fiction. (I failed.) Nor did the Award bring to the attention of the public an otherwise unknown book: Atwood's novel, both before and after filming, created far more publicity for itself than the Clarke Award could ever have done. The choice in a way represented a victory for one faction in the science fiction world: the faction that thinks it reasonable to annex to science fiction anything that resembles science fiction, as opposed to the one that thinks science fiction is a genre consciously produced by self-defined science fiction writers. The factions—not conscious factions, but real nonetheless—both believe in a mission to explain science fiction to the public but have different approaches. One believes that appropriating works such as The Handmaid's Tale (or Gulliver's Travels or Nineteen Eighty-Four) and labeling them "sf' will persuade the public to sample science fiction that is more central to the genre. The other believes in the more direct method of presenting and explaining the genre itself to outsiders, in the hope of enticing them within, or by presenting works that were accessible to the public, that could stand as models of what science fiction could do. Of course, many of the greatest works of sf—Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand among them—are largely impenetrable to the wider public, that is, to those who have not been initiated into the language, the shorthand, the concepts, and resonances of science fiction. Therein lay another dilemma for the Clarke Award judges: if they pick a work to represent the summit of science fictional achievement for the year, are they choosing a work for insiders or outsiders? I know that this was on the minds of some of the judges when they chose the Atwood novel. In the second year of the award the judges did not learn from the Atwood mistake, if mistake it was. Again they—we—awarded the £1,000 to a book that the publishers (Jonathan Cape this time) did not think of as sf and did not submit to the judges without being asked more than once. Jonathan Cape did not regard themselves as sf publishers, and though the book—George Turner's The Sea and Summer (published in the USA as Drowning Towers)—was written by the most experienced sf writer in Australia, and a distinguished sf critic as well, the dustjacket notes contrived to hide these embarrassing facts from potential readers. Again no useful publicity for the award or science fiction emerged; I thankfully came to the end of my two-year appointment to the panel of judges, and handed over to the more publicity-conscious Maxim Jakubowski. I shall skip over subsequent years, during which awards went to Rachel Pollack, Geoff Ryman, Colin Greenland, and Pat Cadigan, and come straight to 1993, when the Award went to Marge Piercy's Body of Glass, the title under which, for reasons I have not been able to establish, the novel He, She, and It was published in the United Kingdom. In some ways the situation was a repeat of The Handmaid's Tale in 1987: the author was an internationally respected writer who was not considered a science fiction writer; who did not need the award in the way that young, underpaid and underrecognized sf writers do; and whose publisher would not wish

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to publicize as a Clarke Award winner. Marge Piercy herself, however, was very different from Atwood. She acknowledged, in the afterword to the book, her debt to science fiction (at least its cyberpunk embodiment), and she was not displeased to win the award. Her displeasure ran in other directions: she wrote in the foreword to Marleen Barr's collected essays Lost in Space that One of Barr's intentions is to rescue women's science fiction from the ghetto of intellectual neglect where it has been in exile. If you doubt the fear of that label, when my novel He, She, and It won the Arthur C. Clarke award for the best work of science fiction published in the United Kingdom, my American publisher would not sticker the book for fear winning this prize would actually hurt sales. Indeed, of all my novels, this one—one of the most ambitious and complex—received the fewest reviews in the feminist press, because of its genre.7 The English publisher did not sticker the book either. But even without the stickers, Marge Piercy seems to believe that her novel was perceived to be science fiction by the public, to the detriment, perhaps, of her sales. If the 1993 Award was not received well by Piercy's publishers, it fared little better within the British sf community either. Colin Greenland, winner of a previous Award, led with a blast in the letter column of I nterzone: Insofar as there really is an SF community in these isles, made up of people with common interests and fellow feeling, we must all suspect that this year the Clarke Award has gone to an author who doesn't need it (or the money that comes with it), who will gain no benefit from the association with the name of her benefactor at a publisher who will have no use for it; on behalf of a community that doesn't approve it; while the booksellers and the public will not even notice it. Surely we must all regret the recurring inability of jury after jury to find a British author on whom to bestow the British SF award, set up by a British author to encourage and promote SF in his native land. And this at a time when British SF is as rich and diverse and vital as it has ever been!8 At the same time, in July 1993, the critic John Clute, one of that first panel of judges back in 1986, weighed in with his attack on Piercy's award. He had been at the award ceremony in March, at London's Groucho Club, where literary and media folk gather for gossip, drink, and indifferent food, and his immediate reaction was that the "decision was so bad my ears must have deceived me." His objection was not that it was not British, but rather that it approached science-fictional ideas and tropes from the outside, and hence was barely science fiction at all. Body of Glass fatally gives off that gingerly feel one often detects when a mainstream author is manipulating SF devices and scenarios to illuminate her own concerns. One can grant willingly that Piercy did a good deal of homework, in contrast to day-trippers like Paul Theroux [he refers to Theroux' novel O-Zone, which was excoriated by reviewers within the SF field]; and that her near-future USA is described competently enough, in reasonably up-to-date, cyberpunk-derived terms. But Body of Glass still reads like a primer-level guidebook-to- the-future, on the pattern of most mainstream SF; and the very heart of the enterprise—a long narrative tracing the allegorical and literal links between an AI [Artificial


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Intelligence] housed in an artificial body and the golem of Jewish legend—fatally reveals an absence of any genuine new contribution to the complex interwoven record of generic attempts to cope with that issue. . . . old tropes are presented . . . with an air of portentous Book-of-the-Month-Club Bulletin, Big-Think iconoclasm that in its second-hand staleness is exactly the opposite of what SF cognition should be; which is threatening, risk-taking, novel, premature. He admits that genuine examples of sf cognition are rare, though they were exhibited by other contenders for the Award, and that "it is the sort of thing SF prizes should be awarded for."9 Other reasons for Clute's annoyance were cited in the same article: that some of the other contenders were centrally important texts in the sf of the 1990s, and were actually better books in conventional literary terms than Piercy's; that Clarke himself would not have liked the book (and would have preferred Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars, for which he had written an extremely favorable blurb); and that it was a slap in the face of the professional sf editors and the sf publishers who had supported the award by giving books, promising to use the Award in promotional material, coming to hear the announcement in the Groucho Club, and helping to finance that event. Those people felt that it was a public relations flop, and that Penguin (who were not going to market Piercy as sf) should not have been rewarded. "They made it clear their feeling that—whatever the motives of the panel might have been—it would look to the world as though the Clarke had been given to Marge Piercy simply because she seemed upmarket,"10 and hence—my addition—that the rest of science fiction was not. The way Penguin blurbed the re-release of the book in the United Kingdom only confirmed Clute's fears and the sf publishers' expectations. The fact that it had won the Award was ignored. One review quoted on the cover said that the book had elevated its author to the "pantheon of haute SF alongside Doris Lessing and Ursula Le Guin," while the other said that ''Body of Glass is much more than science fiction. It's a touching love story . . . and a gripping adventure tale"—as if sf did not include love stories and gripping adventure tales. The same issue of Vector (the critical journal of the British Science Fiction Association) that carried Clute's complaints also featured an article by Maureen Speller, one of the judges, who revealed that five out of the six judges had placed the Piercy book first, and the sixth had placed it second: a much greater show of unanimity, I think, than in the two years in which I was involved. Answering the criticism that it is not really science fiction because it is marketed as mainstream, she says simply, "if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck and is labelled a hen, it is still indisputably a duck."11 These two articles received more feedback, in the next issue of Vector, than any other issue for a long time. One reader complained that Clute seemed to be saying that since the sf publishers were paying, they should be rewarded by having one of their own books win. Another former judge, Paul Kincaid, argued strongly against the politics revealed in Clute's attack, and that the award should go to the best book, not the one that best suits the publishers' PR aims. Another letter, from Chris Bell, points out that the blurbs on most of the other books on the shortlist do not label the

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work as sf either: they are "a gripping thriller" or "a novel" or "a moving work of the imagination," or they claim that the author "breaks the boundaries of conventional fiction" or that she "combines the restless, biting curiosity of a natural SF writer with an ability to project real feeling"—unlike an sf writer, presumably. Bell also noted caustically that "Clute would like us to agree with him that Clarke would agree with Clute."12 The discussion on the Piercy award in the published fora seems to have come to an end with the letter columns of Interzone in October 1993, when Arthur C. Clarke wrote from Sri Lanka to calm the waters with characteristic grace and good humor and to demonstrate that he did not agree with Clute: My memory circuits are now so clogged with gigawords that I find it almost impossible to read fiction. (Stand up the man who said "Or write it either.") I must confess that I've read only one of the winners of the Awards since it was initiated. (I won't say which, but I thoroughly enjoyed it.) In view of the present controversy, I dipped into the opening chapters of Body of Glass, and will say at once that I was very much impressed. If Marge Piercy maintains the same standard throughout the whole book, there's no doubt it is an outstanding work of science fiction, by any definition. May I point out that the judges have an onerous, time-consuming and, in this case, thankless job in reading millions of words to select a winner. I would like to express my gratitude to them for their efforts. Frankly, I can't remember whether I specified that the Award should go to a British author, and I'm not sure whether that would be a good thing. I have never been in favour of ethnic cleansing.13 The controversy may have ended, but the problem remains, and it can only grow. The boundaries are disintegrating as, indeed, in this postmodernist world, they ought. More and more writers are producing novels which, by most factors, should be regarded as science fiction, but which authors and publishers insist are nothing of the kind, including Peter Ackroyd, Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, P. D. James, Philip Kerr, Adam Lively, David Profumo, and Kurt Noon.14 P. D. James, distinguished writer of detective stories, published The Children of Men in 1992: Faber and Faber report her on the dustjacket as saying that it was not science fiction because it dealt with real characters.15 "I suppose it is a sort of moral fable," she said in an interview in the Independent on Sunday, "I don't like to describe it as science fiction."16 ("Intellectually bankrupt" and "aesthetic feebleness" were phrases used by John Clute in a subsequent interview in the Independent}1) The review by Helen Birch in the Independent intelligently argues that "P. D. James excels in the conservative 'common-sense' genre of the whodunnit, but that in The Children of Men she applies the same principles to a genre that by its very nature requires a shift of perspective and a major suspension of disbelief." That genre, she says, needs a political imagination, which James lacks; but the genre Birch speaks of is not science fiction, as one might think, but "dystopia": she compares James's novel unfavorably to "the best dystopian novels . .. books as diverse as 1984, Brave New World, and Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time "^ Dystopias are respectable, in other words. New labels must be invented to describe works of


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science fiction by eminent novelists: anything other than "science fiction." Thus, in the Sunday Times Lesley White called The Handmaid's Tale "futuristic horror."19 James, like Piercy, no doubt realizes the potential danger of being labelled "sci-fi": it may damage the prestige and reduce the income. Canadian writer Douglas Coupland perhaps expresses it best in Rowland Morgan's article about Coupland and Gibson—two Vancouver authors whose attitudes to science fiction are poles apart, even if they both write it: " T don't write science fiction,' Douglas Coupland squawks. . . . 'That's been the nerd ghetto.' "20 As people take up various positions in relation to "science fiction" and defend these positions with firmness and vigor, their debate is ostensibly about the boundaries of the definition of science fiction—but is by no means an intellectual or academic debate; it has political implications, as does any dispute about authority. And the debate in Britain has a different shape to it than anything likely to be found in the United States. Clearly, similar problems exist in the United States and the United Kingdom; but there may be historical reasons for the attitude in Britain which are rather different from those in the United States. As already stated, there are two distinct stances within the science fiction community to the definition of sf: one wishing to include mainstream literature akin to sf, the other wishing to celebrate genre sf for its own sake and exclude outsiders. This has been a clear division within the British sf community at least since the 1960s. There is a direct line from those who wish to include and appropriate mainstream fiction today back to the sf writers in the early 1960s who inaugurated the "New Wave" of British science fiction. Michael Moorcock and his Young Turks, with the occasional help of established sf writers like Brian Aldiss and J. G. Ballard, wanted to raise the literary standards of science fiction, blur the boundaries between science fiction and "serious" literature, and set science-fictional approaches and concepts at the cutting-edge of literature: ultimately, then, to destroy science fiction itself (or retranslate sf as "speculative fiction"). Though the New Wave petered out, traces of New Wave ideology persisted within the British sf community. Portions of the sf community, in fact, had an ethos which had more in common with the British literary establishment than the sf community. The literary establishment in Britain, as in the United States, is an amorphous entity, difficult to locate or to define, made up of the people who dominate the reviews pages of the newspapers, who sit on the panels of the prestigious awards, who mold public opinion about literature. They are a mixed group—some academics, some full-time writers, some editors, some who appear on radio and television: a significant segment of what former Prime Minister John Major contemptuously called "the chattering classes." Many are graduates of Oxford or Cambridge, still believing themselves to constitute the British elite. The Canadian-born Londoner John Clute has seen the most characteristic determining factor in the consciousness of the literary establishment to be the "absolutely invidious class system" in Britain, in which the "heirs of Richard Hoggart lost the battle to those of F.R. Leavis."21 Hoggart, a socialist, stood for a democratization of literature and the abandonment of artificial distinctions between

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"high" and "low"; Leavis stood for maintaining the elite status of High Literature. Hoggart has hardly lost out totally: there are prominent Marxist critics like Terry Eagleton—now, ironically, holding one of the most prestigious Chairs of English Literature in the country, at Oxford—and most of those filling the newly burgeoning academic departments of Cultural Studies are resolute Hoggartians. But science fiction remains systematically marginalized by the literary establishment, almost never taught in university departments of English, almost never reviewed at any length in the newspapers or literary reviews. "Do you really enjoy that stuff?" sniffed the reviews editor of the Times Literary Supplement as she sent me a Discworld novel, Terry Pratchert's seventeenth but the first to be reviewed in the TLS. Publishers have never to my knowledge submitted a science fiction novel to be considered for the Booker Prize, Britain's most prestigious literary award. But if the class system lies behind this disdain, a more direct reason is the structure of education. The literary establishment is made up largely of people who have had no formal scientific education whatsoever after the age of 16 or even (as in my case) 14, people who quite possibly have a greater degree of ignorance and hostility towards science than is to be found in British culture as a whole. The astronomer Heather Couper, whom I mentioned earlier, lamented this problem: The government backs science; the public want to learn (the stunning success of Stephen Hawking's,4 Brief History Of Time revealed an enormous scientific appetite): now surely, the chasm will start to close up. But the media, still firmly controlled by arts and politics graduates, doesn't quite see things this way. Science does feature in the media but only if it knows its place. It is ghettoised into "slots" that stand completely alone, putting it safely apart from all other human endeavours. If a science story does make the mainstream news, it is likely to be sensational or controversial.22 If one were to judge by the success of science fiction movies like Terminator 2 (top in video rentals in 1993) or Jurassic Park, the public in Britain is as starved of science fiction as it is, according to Couper, of science. But they will find no encouragement or guidance in the media or literary circles, where ignorance of and lack of sympathy with science fiction are all too common: as we have seen, the phrase "science fiction" is commonly used in the quality press in Britain in a pejorative sense. What brings the debate within the orbit of the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the sf community results from the desire of those in the sf community to be accepted by the literary establishment. This was noted by Gregory Benford in a paper associating the trend with what he called the "slow slide of the journal Foundation into a posture of wan literary-fiction boredom": The toe-hold many of the London based lit'ry-life folk have within the small side businesses (reviewing, part-time editing, and so on) gives them some cachet and entrance to large literary circles, where the unabashed technophiliac attitude of much SF (especially American) is embarrassing. Their reaction is frequently to become cheerleaders for stylistic innovation, which has never been the root strength of the genre. This leads to reviews praising the assembly of silky sentences but ignoring the worn idea structure of much British


11

SF. This couples with the quite natural irritation that the British market is dominated by technophiliac stories written with an American accent. Perhaps, as is true of academic politics, the competition is fierce precisely because the spoils are so meager.23 The literary establishment in Britain can thus be associated with class snobbishness, the low esteem in which science is held in the literary community, and, by no means least, the latent or apparent anti-Americanism to be found in such circles, which clearly militates against any easy acceptance of science fiction. Were I a science fiction writer, I could conclude with a vision of the future when the Arthur C. Clarke Award ceremony is shown on prime-time TV (as the Booker ceremony is now), when readers eagerly discuss the shortlist and place bets on the winner (as happens with the Booker Prize now), and where as a result of the consequent publicity the cultural barriers between the science fiction and literary worlds have broken down and the world is thus a much better place. But historians are even worse prophets than science fiction writers, and much more cynical.

Notes 1. Steve Homer, "Satellite Rings Offer Promise," Independent, September 30, 1992, 30. 2. Rosemary Bailey, "High Heels and Hi-Tech in a Brutal Fictional World," Independent, May 19, 1992, 12. 3. Review of Visions for the 21st Century, ed. Sheila Moorcroft, Sunday Times, December 13, 1992,6:14. 4. Cited in Carol Allen, "Beam Me Up, Ebenezer," Times, December 24, 1992, 3:18. 5. Lamont, "Atticus," Sunday Times, September 12, 1993, 2:3. 6. Heather Couper, "How to Read Your Stars," Sunday Times, July 25, 1993, 9. 7. Marge Piercy, "Foreword," in Lost in Space: Probing Science Fiction and Beyond, by Marleen Barr (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), x. 8. Colin Greenland, letter, Interzone, no. 73 (July 1993), 4. 9. John Clute, "On the Arthur C. Clarke Award 1993: A Guest Editorial," Vector, no. 173 (June/July 1993), 3. 10. Clute, 4. 11. Maureen Speller, "A Judges [sic] Summary of the Clarke Award," Vector, no. 173 (June/July 1993), 12. 12. Letter column, Vector, no. 174 (August/September 1993), 5. 13. Clarke, letter, Interzone, no. 76 (October 1993), 4. 14. Some are discussed in Nicholas Lezard, "Invasion of the SF Snatchers," Sunday Times, May 16, 1993, 6. 15. As reported in Rowland Morgan, "Out of the Ghetto," Independent, December 18, 1993,28. 16. P. D. James, interview with Jan Dalley, Independent on Sunday, September 20, 1992. 17. Cited in Morgan, 28. 18. Helen Birch, "When All Agreed to Have No More Babies," Independent, September 26, 1992,26. 19. Lesley White, Sunday Times, August 16, 1993.

74 Science Fiction, Canonization, Marginalization 20. Cited in Morgan, 28. 21. Cited in Morgan, 28. 22. Couper, 9. 23. Gregory Benford, "In the Wake of the Wave: The British Science Fiction Market," in Science Fiction and Market Realities, ed. Gary Westfahl, George Slusser, and Eric S. Rabkin (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 154.

Chapter 7

Popes or Tropes: Defining the Grails of Science Fiction Joseph D. Miller

Historically, the attempt to define science fiction has been an endlessly engaging and generally harmless parlor game for critics of the genre. Perhaps that harmlessness reflects the degree of attention that we pay each other. But the naming of true names is synonymous with the wielding of great power—the power to crystallize a field, a specialty, or a profession by the synthesis of a definitive corpus of work. This is not necessarily a bad thing; academic history is rife with examples of classic texts that have so defined and usefully focused whole realms of enquiry. The risk is a premature descent into stasis, often signalling conclusion of the dynamic phase of intellectual exploration. Contemporary science fiction may be undergoing exactly such a change of state. In the past we have been marginalized and ghettoized; today we are Nortonized! In America the maturation of a literary specialty is often heralded by the publication of a Norton anthology. And the editor of such a distinguished anthology wields an absolute, essentially papal power in defining a field by inclusion and exclusion. Thus we have The Norton Book of Science Fiction} Presumably, the appearance of this book in 1993 meant that the field had been deemed sufficiently sanitized so as to be teachable to college freshmen. Perhaps such an anthology marked the maturation of our field and a degree of acceptance by the wider literary community. Or perhaps it marked the beginning of decline and absorption into the ranks of the mundane. Of course, whenever editors assemble a genre-defining anthology (or when a pope releases a papal bull), the results may be idiosyncratic, anachronistic, unrepresentative, or even patently offensive. To judge objectively the value of such acts of individual definition, one must compare them to the collective definition: the ways the genre (or belief system) has been defined by writers, editors, readers, and practitioners in general. This reformative act of comparison inherently threatens the primacy of authority; in traditional Catholicism the comparative act would be judged unnecessary since the collective definition invests the Pope with absolute authority. Since the science fiction community does not invest Norton anthologists

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with primal authority, a Protestant act of comparative validation is appropriate. The crucible of comparison in this chapter will test whether the Norton Book is a representative selection of the uncollected and unbound archetypal anthology constituting the genre of science fiction. The obvious way to decide such matters is to consider the texts chosen by Le Guin and Attebery for the Norton Book. On first reading the table of contents I was struck by the absence of such iconic figures as Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Ray Bradbury. The editors have limited the collection to science fiction published after 1960, and it could be argued that much of the best work of these authors was published before that date. However, it is then necessary to assume that such worthies as Sonya Dorman Hess, Molly Gloss, and Diane Glancy have produced intrinsically better stories than anything written by the aforementioned triplet of Grandmasters since 1960. This seems an unlikely proposition to say the least. An alternative explanation is that the Grandmasters are "solid testosterone" (17) in the words of Le Guin's "Introduction," an implied exclusion criterion for stories in the anthology. Much of Heinlein could be criticized on this basis, but Asimov and Bradbury? Furthermore, is it reasonable under any circumstance to exclude an author solely on the basis of overindulgence in sexual stereotyping? And where are Thomas M. Disch and Kurt Vonnegut? Must we assume that these much more politically correct authors are also "solid testosterone"? Other exclusion criteria were also employed; stories involving racism, homophobia, misogyny (but apparently not "misandry"; e.g., the story by Joanna Russ), and excessive violence were not considered. But surely such criteria cannot explain the absence of the authors I have named. One contributing factor for these exclusions can be inferred from certain statements in Le Guin's "Introduction": "Critics of landscape paintings don't analyze and judge the actual hills and rivers painted by the artist; they discuss the paintings. 'An idea,' to a writer, is a very different thing from a scientist's 'idea,' and the writer's pursuit of it is not an intellectual but an aesthetic one" (25). These are surprisingly dogmatic statements and it is clear that precisely those writers who pursue the intellectual sometimes to the neglect of the aesthetic (e.g., Asimov, Heinlein) are the writers to whom Le Guin takes exception. She has less of a problem with the pursuit of the aesthetic in the absence of the intellectual. Further, some critics (including me) are quite happy to consider both the "painting" and "the actual hills and rivers." This does, however, require some minimal familiarity with the scientific content, often with the "hard" scientific content of science fiction. Perhaps it is here where Le Guin's background in the social, rather than the physical, sciences makes itself evident as a bias. The best science fiction writers, whether hard or soft science fiction, pursue ideas intellectually and aesthetically. Adequate criticism must do the same. Further clues to Le Guin's underlying bias may be seen in her agreement with Samuel R. Delany that "the difference between realistic fiction and science fiction may be one of degree and not of kind," and "The difference between these young genres, realistic and science fiction, is less than the difference of both of them from

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fantasy" (28). Since she later states that fantasy and science fiction "constantly overlap" (29), we must conclude that, in her view, realistic and science fiction are of the same cloth. This would explain the inclusion of a "realistic" story like Connie Willis's "Schwartzchild Radius" and the exclusion of hard science/"idea" stories like Larry Niven's "Neutron Star" or "The Hole Man." But something else is going on here. There seems to be a sizable number of authors in this collection who have contributed vanishingly little to the corpus of science fiction. While certain of these authors, such as Andrew Weiner, Michael Blumlein, and James Patrick Kelly are obviously male, a disproportionately large number are female. Being of a quantitative mind, I classified the authors according to my own notion of whether they are seminal or, to use Le Guin's term, "ovular" (17). Of the 41 male authors, I deemed 33 to be seminal (Poul Anderson, Greg Bear, Gregory Benford, Michael Bishop, James Blish, Edward Bryant, David R. Bunch, Orson Scott Card, Avram Davidson, Samuel R. Delany, Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, William Gibson, Joe Haldeman, Damon Knight, R. A. Lafferty, Fritz Leiber, Barry N. Malzberg, Frederik Pohl, Paul Preuss, Kim Stanley Robinson, James H. Schmitz, Robert Sheckley, Lewis Shiner, Robert Silverberg, Clifford D. Simak, Cordwainer Smith, Bruce Sterling, Theodore Sturgeon, Michael Swanwick, John Varley, Gene Wolfe, and Roger Zelazny) and only 8 to be ovular (Michael Blumlein, Michael G. Coney, John Crowley, James Patrick Kelly, John Kessel, Mike Resnick, Howard Waldrop, and Andrew Weiner). Of the 26 female authors, I deemed only 5 to be seminal (Octavia E. Butler, Zenna Henderson, Ursula K. Le Guin, James P. Tiptree, Jr. [Alice Sheldon], and Kate Wilhelm) and 21 to be ovular (Eleanor Arnason, Margaret Atwood, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Pat Cadigan, Candas Jane Dorsey, Suzerte Haden Elgin, Carol Emshwiller, Karen Joy Fowler, Diane Glancy, Molly Gloss, Lisa Goldstein, Phyllis Gotlieb, Eileen Gunn, Sonya Dorman Hess, Nancy Kress, Vonda N. Mclntyre, Katherine MacLean, Pat Murphy, Joanna Russ, Pamela Sargent, and Connie Willis). After determining the representation of male and female authors in the seminal and ovular categories, I performed a chi squared test which is a statistical measure of the association between two bivariate categories (male vs. female and seminal vs. ovular in this case). The relationship was highly significant, indicating a real sex difference between my constructed categories of seminal and ovular. I wondered whether my seminal and ovular categories could be supported by literary data. I hypothesized that the best writers would be the most frequently anthologized. So I turned to the Science Fiction Story Index, which lists all anthologized science fiction stories from 1950 to 1979. I determined the total number of separate stories anthologized and the total number of anthologizations for each author of the seminal and ovular categories who were writing in this period. The average seminal author was included in 54.2 anthologies and had 20 stories anthologized, while the average ovular author was included in 11.8 anthologies and had 3.5 stories anthologized. The fact that the seminal authors were anthologized about five times more frequently than the ovular authors represents a highly significant difference.

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Restricting the analysis solely to female authors of the seminal and ovular categories, I found that the average seminal female author was included in 28 anthologies and had 11.2 stories anthologized, while the average ovular female author was included in 12.4 anthologies and had 4 stories anthologized. Again this was a significant difference. Further, the obvious authors excluded by Le Guin and Attebery (Asimov, Heinlein, Niven, Bradbury, Vonnegut, Disch) exhibited an even higher anthologization rate. This was not a completely fair test, since the period covered extended ten years before 1960 and ended before the years of greatest productivity for the newer authors. So I performed a similar calculation on the total number of citations (original and reprinted stories) for these authors in The NESFA Index to Short Science Fiction for 1989. I found the seminal authors were indexed about 1.74 times more frequently than the ovular authors in 1989. At this point I was still not happy with the analysis. A proper citation analysis should cover every year from 1960 to the present. Furthermore, such an analysis should also consider the sex of the anthology editor and some measure of the quality of the anthology. Sophisticated citation analyses of this type are commonly used in tenure review, but the science fiction literature cannot at this time be searched by computer for such information. What I really needed was some method of validation independent of our unwieldy science fiction data base. I kept thinking about the conclusion of Miracle on 34th Street, when the identity of Kris Kringle is validated by an external agency, the U.S. Post Office. Then I encountered a letter from Arthur C. Clarke to the editor of The Oxford English Dictionary (CD-ROM version), cited in Locus,4 where he gave the number of citations (largely for sf neologisms) in the computerized OED for a small group of science fiction writers. Immediately I realized that the degree of cultural impact of a writer could have no better measure than its effect on the language itself! So I tabulated the number of references in the OED to the seminal and ovular writers. I found 9 authors averaged approximately 13 citations each in the OED. All of these were in the seminal group. I also found that the 5 excluded authors mentioned above averaged almost twice that number of citations. Now one can argue that the OED has a strong anglic and possibly sexist bias, perhaps explaining the relatively small number of cited American science fiction authors. But I still find it extraordinary that not one of the ovular authors is cited. At this point in the analysis, I decided to actually read and re-read every story in the collection. I needed to consider the possibility that although the ovular writers themselves did not fare well in my analyses, individual stories from such authors could still be outstanding. What I noticed first was that ten of these so-called science fiction stories were not really science fiction, but should rather be termed realistic fiction (Arnason, Atwood, Leiber, MacLean, Sargent), magic realism (Card, Glancy, Shiner) or historical fiction (Preuss, Willis). Interestingly, of the 41 stories by male authors, only 4 were not science fiction, while of fe 26 stories by female authors, 6 were not science fiction. In addition, I felt that another 11 stories should not have appeared in a collection of the "best" because they poorly


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represented an author when better stories were available (Sturgeon, Zelazny), minor works in any event (Blumlein, Gloss, Hess, Kelly, Schmitz, Simak), or histrionic or mean-spirited (Cadigan, Elgin, Russ). Of the 41 stories by male authors, I found 31 were good stories and 10 were bad stories, while of the 26 stories by female authors, I found 15 were good stories and 11 were bad stories. Overall, whether the breakdown is by author or by story, my analyses suggest that 15 to 35% of the "good" stories were authored by women, whereas 50 to 72% of the "bad" stories were by women. Now what exactly does this mean? One possibility is that Le Guin and Attebery are guilty of reverse sexism and have included stories of little merit except perhaps for their ability to redress the presumed historical inequity of the underrepresentation of women in science fiction. Another possibility is that I am simply a sexist pig with very little sensitivity to quality science fiction. I hope that sexism is much like insanity in that my suspicion of it in myself argues against me actually being a sexist pig. Further, it seems unlikely that a sexist pig would include a group of female authors in the seminal category. For what it is worth, I can also point out that I count among my favorite authors C. J. Cherryh, Laura Mixson, and Emma Bull, all of whom are not represented in this collection (though admittedly this may reflect the small amount of short fiction these authors have generated). But more quantitative arguments are necessary to this analysis. Thus I decided to examine the female proportion of winners of the Nebula and Hugo awards since 1960.1 obtained a smoothed plot of the two-year averages for these awards. During this period of time, female authors won 21% of the Hugos and 29% of the Nebulas, which closely reflects the percentage of female science fiction authors over the same period. It is interesting to note the similarity in the two functions for Nebula and Hugo winners. Both functions show a steady increase until the mid-1970s, oscillations and a general levelling off until the early to mid-1980s, and a subsequent monotonic increase to the 1990s. Arguably, in terms of the highest awards of science fiction, women authors have obtained parity with men despite their substantially smaller percentage representation in terms of published work. For instance, the NESFA Index for 1989 indicates that 26% of listed short works in science fiction are authored by women. Similarly, the percentage representation of female authors appears to be about 25%. One directory of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America listed about 1,000 authors, and a published estimate of the number of living female science fiction writers is 250.5 Thus, over the 33 years in question women have accounted for an average of 25% of the highest awards in the field. Currently, they write about 25% of the short fiction and make up about 25% of the author population. It is reasonable to think then that the percentage representation of women in a collection of the "best" of science fiction over this time period should be about 25%. What we actually see in the Norton collection is 39%. The difference between these figures is highly significant and supports my contention that the Norton collection is sexually skewed. Now it is possible to maintain that all the indices I have used are biased against

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women. This would put me, the fans who vote for Hugos, the SFWA, the science fiction anthologies, at least three reference texts, and the OED on one side, and Le Guin and Attebery on the other. I find myself in good company. But it is nevertheless true that sexism may affect critical judgment. It would be interesting to compare sexual representation in anthologies edited by women with those edited by men over the period in question. For instance, about 16% of the stories in the Judith Merril anthologies for 1960 and 1961 are by women, a considerably higher figure than what might be expected from the Hugo or Nebula numbers for the same years. It is clear that a final resolution of this issue will require a great deal more work. I want to return to another issue, the distinction between science fiction and realism, magic or otherwise. As indicated above, at least ten of the works in this anthology are not science fiction at all. Two are essentially historical fictions (Preuss, Willis)—stories of the final days of two of the major lights of physics, Marie Curie and Martin Schwartzchild, but essentially lack any of the elements of science fiction. Three stories are magic realism: the Card story is the rebirth of the Indian god Quetzlcoatl and the subsequent Indianization of America, the Shiner story imagines a kind of Vietnamization of America, and the Glancy story is a politically correct description of the Indianization of the Indian! The realistic stories include self-induced hallucinations with more or less autonomy (Arnason, Leiber), a pedestrian story of First Contact without any contact (Atwood), and a well-written description of a latter-day Thuggee cult (MacLean). Here perhaps is the real crux of the matter; these stories are certainly literary, and politically correct, yet almost completely lacking in the tropes, icons, or archetypes of classic science fiction. Now when I state that certain stories "are not science fiction at all," this could be seen as a difference in individual definitions: Le Guin and Attebery see them as science fiction, this author does not. But the assertion is not based on my own personal likes and dislikes, but rather on a reasonably broad sampling of the genre gained from a lifetime of reading and interaction with other readers, that is, on the kind of collective definition referred to earlier. If one examines a large enough sample of the genre for commonalities it is obvious that canonical inclusion or exclusion in the science fiction genre is largely a matter of explicit and implied thematic content. Doris Lessing, latter day Vonnegut, and William Golding are usually considered mainstream or "realistic" in Le Guinian parlance, not only because of their political correctness and literary pretension, but because the intrinsic thematic content of their work is inherently conservative and aligned with the social status quo, no matter what minor elements of science fiction they may employ for stagecraft. In contrast, even if Heinlein had somehow managed to attain political correctness, he could never have obtained the adulation of the literati for, for instance, Philip K. Dick because Heinlein was at heart an optimist, concerned with the betterment of society through social and technological change. This is the crux of the matter; science fiction writers and science fiction readers (at least the best of them!) want things to change and change for the better (while justifiably fearing that they may indeed change for the worst). This is either incomprehensible


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or, if comprehended, terrifying for the mainstream community, in literature and in society. The basic project and motivation of science fiction is a revolutionary threat to things as they are. Strangely, the science fiction community itself rarely introspects on these matters. Yet I maintain that our shared agenda for change is part and parcel of a consensual projected reality which is reflected in the texts of the genre and which feeds back onto the reader. The consensus is manifested by the easy acceptance of certain basic tropes of science fiction, for example, faster than light travel, artificial intelligence, human genetic engineering—exactly those tropes that are completely lacking in the ten stories mentioned above. And the tropes contribute to the consensus by the frequency of their appearance in the genre. The tropes themselves are as the Holy Grail to Arthur's knights, answering the question "What does the science fiction author/reader really want?" That answer reveals a great deal of the psychology of both the science fiction and the mainstream communities. To paraphrase Mark Twain, the science fiction community has already "lit out for the territories"; mainstream American twentieth-century literature, by and large, is for the cerebral agoraphobe. But the agoraphobes are the arbiters of cultural value. The optimum strategy for the agoraphobe is to belittle the radical and diminish its threat. Thus the moniker is "Star Wars" and not "Strategic Defense Initiative." Exactly what are the tropes of science fiction? Here, with limited space, I can only provide a hasty and incomplete list. One of the earliest and foremost is the trope of time travel; what if one acts in the past, changes the past? Or what if one acts in the present, based on knowledge of the future? This leads directly to a second trope, the parallel universe or alternate worlds trope, since time travel provides a way to create such worlds. These tropes subsume realistic fiction as a trivial case, for as Delany says, "Naturalistic fictions are parallel world stories in which the divergence from the real is . . . slight" (cited by Le Guin 27). Another common trope is the robot, represented in film by Robby the Robot and R2D2. But science fiction has largely abandoned this archetype and replaced it with AI, the oceanic soul of cyberpunk. What is the attraction of this trope? Could it be that by fathering (or mothering) a superior intelligence we are fulfilling the parental fantasy, giving birth to something inherently greater than ourselves? Another trope is FTL (faster than light travel). We assume some method of traveling faster than light in many of our works. Why? Largely, I think, to get around easily in the universe and meet other lonely entities. But why do we care about making First Contact? Again I think science fiction is particularly sensitive to the utter loneliness of the human condition. We are drawn to the image of the Other, the Alien, because it reifies our hope that intelligence is not merely a local aberration, that we do not carry the sole burden of intelligence and awareness in this universe. Yet the Other promises to instruct us and ultimately to transform us, and in that lies the fear of loss of self, the fear of subsumption into the Other, the fear that we will be Westernized as we have Westernized every indigenous culture we have encountered. Thus we are the animal that craves society and at the same time fears the loss of individuality.

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That leads directly to the next trope, the paranormal trope. Probably the most common trope in paranormal fiction is telepathy, another antidote to perpetual loneliness, but there are others. Telekinesis is rare in modern science fiction, perhaps because this trope has infected mainstream culture. Thus we have telepresence, electronic action at a distance, and virtual reality. Clairvoyance in the temporal sense, seeing the future, is largely identical to the time travel trope I have mentioned. Clairvoyance in the "far seeing" sense of Julian May is already technologically realized, with CNN, the Internet, and 500 channels of cable television. This trope has fallen right out of science fiction. A more common trope is genetic engineering. What exactly gets engineered? The two most common biological updates result either in augmented intelligence or immortality. Here we see again the conflicting motives of transformation vs. preservation of the self. If we cannot attain transformation, illumination and transcendence through the Alien or the AI, we will make ourselves into Superior Others "by our bootstraps." Another path to transcendence in "biopunk" fiction is the telepathic genetic add-on. Recombinant communion solves the problem of loneliness and alienation; simply edit them out of the genome. A final trope to consider might be called the Social Science Project. This theme in science fiction pursues three questions: (1) Can we understand human behavior? (2) Can we predict human behavior? (3) Can we improve human behavior? So, I have identified a few of the tropes, the consensual figures of speech, in science fiction. I have tried to examine some of the psychological motivations underlying the pursuit of these Grails. What conclusions are possible? One conclusion, I think, is that humans are whiners. We spend half our time bitching about how lonely we are or, more constructively, seeking release from that condition. If that project succeeds, then of course we spend the rest of our time worrying about our loss of personal freedom, of personal will, ultimately of that very same loneliness we so thoroughly detest. Science fiction reflects this state of affairs in many of its tropes. But there is nothing unique in this. Realistic fiction deals with alienation in all its forms, and with transformation and transcendence of that condition. Realistic fiction deals with the desire for communion and the hunger for god. Where realism fails is in doing justice to that old monkey curiosity. Science fiction, for all the triteness of the statement, is indeed a literature of ideas. The truly new, the truly novel—that is the essence of science fiction. Our ideas of communion require no churches; our aliens do not carry passports. What of the tropes of other genres? These tropes, I think, are static. They are the Cowboy, the Vampire, the Detective, the Wizard, and Fabio, the Romantic Pirate. Our tropes, in contrast, are in constant flux. Witness the transformation from Golem to Robot to AI to Cyborg to postcyberpunker. By the time one of our tropes surfaces in mundane culture, we have typically passed light years beyond it. Television has Captain Kirk and the new improved Captain Picard; we have Captain Sirocco Jones! But the dynamism and novelty of our tropes makes them phenomenally infectious nonetheless. If for no other reason than that, science fiction is finally coming into its own. If we must, we can define our anarchistic field in


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terms of its tropes, themes, and attitude, while knowing that definition must always be incomplete, since the very act of definition is a challenge to transcend it. We have left the ghetto far behind. The real tragedy would be to freely enter into yet another prison under the guise of some misplaced desire for acceptance into the camp of the politically correct and fashionably realistic, blessed by the editorial papacy of the mundane. Our path must be a different one; writers, critics, and fans all ride the Galactic Bus, and as any fan of The Honeymooners is sure to remember, Norton was never the bus driver!

Notes 1. Ursula K. Le Guin and Brian Attebery, eds., The Norton Book of Science Fiction (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993). Later parenthetical page references in the text are to Le Guin's "Introduction" in this edition. 2. Marilyn P. Fletcher, Science Fiction Story Index (Chicago: American Library Association, 1981). 3. The NESFA Index to Short Science Fiction (Cambridge: NESFA Press, 1989). 4. Arthur C. Clarke, letter to the editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, cited in Locus, 32 (February 1994), 9. 5. Sharon Yntema, More Than 100 Woman Science Fiction Writers (Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1988).


Chapter 8

Science Fiction Eye and the Rebellion against Recursion Stephen P. Brown

As I seem to have been born with an anarchic streak, I am uncomfortable confronting the topic of authority in sf, specifically as to whether or not I have become one myself. However, due to the relative longevity of Science Fiction Eye and its prominence in the field, the role of authority seems to have de facto settled over me. Ultimately the true authorities in sf are the readers who vote with their money and decide what will be published and what the real trends are. But economic democracy has created a field dominated by movie and TV novelizations and interminable cookie cutter fantasy series. The function of critics is to alert the bored reader to wider possibilities and try to counteract aesthetically destructive trends. Most people who grow up reading sf with the kind of fervent passion that I did tended to lose interest, as I did, by their late teens. We moved on to more challenging forms of entertainment. After a while, it might occur to sf readers in their mid-twenties that it has been eight years since they have read any sf. There is regret and loss, perhaps a realization that almost nothing in the adult world can give the same kind of excitement, the lurid intellectual extravaganza, the repeated awestricken frisson. But few readers follow through on their regret—one may also miss one's three-wheeler, but there are not many 25-year-olds tooling around on a tricycle. Sometimes, one of us comes back. Perhaps it was a chance encounter with an interesting book, or an interesting person. We begin reading science fiction again. One of the ironies of the genre is that scattered among the juvenilia are a number of genuinely adult works, novels that challenge on a profound level, that utilize the architecture of science fiction because there are some themes that simply cannot be considered otherwise. Of course, finding those books buried in the tide can be difficult. There are marketing and critical controversies, of course, most notably the tendency to extract a superb sf novel from its genre and label it sui generis. There

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is a parallel situation in the crime and detective genre, wherein, for example, Crime and Punishment is never considered to be a genre novel. The excellent books are viewed as aberrations, good novels in spite of their sf clothing. I consider this to be a false argument. Sf, like all forms of entertainment, should be broad enough to encompass both juvenile and adult forms, commercial crap and works of authentic genius. One doesn't lump together The Wind in the Willows with Cry the Beloved Country, or Judith Krantz with Cormac McCarthy. But this is a digression. The issue of artistic validity in sf I will leave to others. I bring it up to demonstrate how difficult it can be to come back to sf. The cultural pressures can be intense. For me, it was a person. When I was in my mid-twenties, I met an obsessed, driven eighteen-year-old named John Shirley. John was (and is) passionate about the symbolic power of surreal fiction. He reintroduced me to sf, but a very different kind of sf—Camp Concentration rather than Starship Troopers. John showed me that a field I had thought contained nothing but Heinleins and Asimovs also contained Ballards, Moorcocks, Dicks and Delanys. Throughout the early 1970s John Shirley and I shared houses, books, and our lives. John wrote intense deranged fiction (the best of which has been collected in the seminal Heatseeker anthology from Scream Press), and through my proximity to him, a passion for adult sf was ignited in me. This passion caused me to try to write it myself, but with limited success. It did carry me to the Clarion Workshop in 1974 (where I met another eighteen-year-old, Bruce Sterling), but it never took. I began, instead, to critique, to write reviews and commentary in a widening circle of magazines and newspapers. Then there followed several tumultuous years that included lengthy periods of literary neglect. By the beginning of the 1980s, I had resurfaced in Washington, DC, working in a bookstore. I began to read again and occasionally to write about it. My reading had settled into a pattern that remains to this day: a quarter sf, a quarter mainstream and other genres, and half non-fiction. I began to go to local sf conventions for the first time, and there I discovered a kind of sf reader that surprised me—the recursive fan. This was a reader who read only sf, and based his or her knowledge of literary trends (and, in some extreme cases, the world at large) in the sole context of previously written sf. This created a weirdly stunted and incomplete view of literature, sf and the rest of the culture. Fascinated, I began to notice that quite a few of the popular writers were recursive fans turned pro. Recursive sf, it turned out, was becoming the dominant strain. Perhaps, I wondered, this was due to the one aspect of the sf field that sets it off from other genres. Sf people are simply too clubby. They tend to hang out together, interact with each other, and cross-fertilize each other unceasingly. Generally this is a good thing. But this aspect has given rise to a serious weakness on the part of both readers and writers. Many of today's writers have grown up on the work of the sf writers of yesterday. Many of today's readers eagerly subsidize those writers. But those very writers of yesterday, the Sturgeons, the Kornbluths, the Blishes, were themselves

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influenced by the entire spectrum of literature and culture. By patterning oneself exclusively on the older sf writers, literary tropes become reflected in decayed form, like recopying a document over and over again. Also, this tends to freeze literary evolution as the writers and readers increasingly ignore the outside world. I worried about this. In correspondence with friends (John Shirley, Bruce Sterling, and William Gibson, a new writer introduced to me by John) I found that I was not alone. We shared a belief that sf afforded a kind of freedom and a metaphoric power that could not be found in any other kind of fiction, even in the Marquezian "Magic Realism" school emerging from South America. Yet, that power was being squandered by lazy writers and, more importantly, by sincere writers who were unfortunately ignorant of the world outside their self-created ghetto. We saw sf writers deemed "experimental" and "groundbreaking" for merely utilizing old fictional techniques pioneered by Kafka, Dos Passos, Genet, Burroughs and Pynchon. Meanwhile, the world outside was changing fast, mutating out of control. Sf writers were perfectly positioned to make sense of this, but were failing to do so. The writers I was corresponding with decided to do something about it. Shirley, Sterling, Gibson, and a few newer voices like Lewis Shiner, Pat Cadigan, and Rudy Rucker began challenging each other with what some of us called "science fiction for grown-ups." The salient characteristic shared by these very different writers was an awareness of the general flow of literature, and an awareness of the currents running through the culture. Recursive they were not. Vincent Price once said, "There is a whole world on the stage and screen, but a bigger one beyond." The readers of this magazine well know what happened next. Suffice to say that the success of this group seemed to create a climate in which more and better sf for grown-ups, nonrecursive sf, was being written and published than ever before. Books that had nothing to do with the cyberpunks, books by Karen Joy Fowler, Kim Stanley Robinson, Nancy Kress, John Kessel, Kathleen Ann Goonan, Octavia E. Butler, Elizabeth Hand, Pat Murphy, Lucius Shepard, and on and on. The second significant aspect of this, as noted by this list, is the relatively high percentage of women writers. The ascendancy of the women sf writers is perhaps the single most important thing to happen to genre sf in its brief lifetime. But that, too, is someone else's essay. As I watched the engine beginning to gather speed and power, as my friends began to leave behind their obscurity and dominate the field, I felt the need to do something more than write the occasional book review. The battle against recursive sf was finally fully engaged and I no longer felt satisfied with cheering from the sidelines. Dan Steffan came to me one day and said, "Let's start a magazine." Dan is a good artist and an excellent graphic designer. I was excited by his visual ideas and plunged into the project whole-heartedly. I gathered together some material from the people I knew, interviews with Gibson and Sterling and a panel discussion transcript involving John Shirley, Jack Williamson, Norman Spinrad, and Gregory Benford. Ted White and John Kessel contributed articles, and Bruce Sterling began his long-running Catscan column. Dan designed and laid out the magazine and I

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processed the words. Today, that issue seems crude in appearance to me, though the content holds up surprisingly well. Simultaneously with the creation of the first issue of the Eye, I met a passionate Japanese academic, Takayuki Tatsumi. Takayuki has written a number of critical works and is a professor at Tokyo University. Through him I became aware of a community of serious academic study of the genre. Much of this I also found recursive, but there were a few people pushing back the critical boundaries. Takayuki became one of the most important people in the growth of the Eye into what it eventually became: the influence that kept an uncompromising rigor to the criticism. I often published material that didn't live up to his high standards, but at least I was aware I was doing so. His own contributions, particularly in his longrunning intermittent "Graffiti's Rainbow" column, have significantly pushed forward the boundaries, and continue to do so today in other forums. Over the next few years, Dan and I put out an issue approximately twice a year, and it grew. We were blessed with a wealth of superb material right from the start. We published interviews with Lucius Shepard, Samuel R. Delany, Clive Barker, Lewis Shiner and Howard Waldrop (interviewing each other), Ellen Datlow, and Iain Banks. Original articles were written by Rudy Rucker, John Shirley, William Gibson, Gregory Benford, Charles Platt, J. G. Ballard, and many others. The bigger the magazine grew, the more interesting the submissions seemed to become. Non-sf material began to show up. The Eye began branching out into nonliterary territory with articles about the California drug designers, Cuba, growing up, the Burgess Shale, traveling in the Ukraine (by Terry Bisson) and Moscow (by Jack Womack) and the Swiss Alps (by Kim Stanley Robinson), business ethics, cryogenics, AIDS, and many other topics. Soon I was seeing the magazine begin to reflect my own reading balance: a quarter sf, a quarter other forms of literature, and half nonfiction. My working motto became "We don't publish material sf readers are interested in, we publish material they ought to be interested in." I began to see the magazine as a very real antirecursive force. From the beginning the Eye was mired in controversy. We have had serious argument over Orson Scott Card, Scientologists, Clarion, feminism, and the Craig Strete plagiarism case, to name but a few highlights. I have tried hard to encourage debate. The writers responded with enthusiasm. Often I would publish an essay or letter that was patently over-the-top because I knew it would galvanize people into heated response. I feel that the extremity of many positions taken in the Eye and the vehemence with which they are taken was quite important, though not my raison d'etre (though many seem to think that the Eye was nothing but a forum for screaming argument, this kind of debate has never filled more than five percent of any given issue). Significantly, Locus publicly announced a policy of only printing positive book reviews a few years ago. I consider this a remarkable and dangerous step. Negative book reviews are crucial, though I don't believe there is any value in picking apart a mediocre book—the value is in calling a very good author on points where she came up short. The debate fostered enlivens the field, keeps both authors and readers on their toes and, most importantly, helps to create a climate

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where readers will settle for nothing less than the very best and authors will feel challenged to write nothing but the very best. After the fifth issue, Dan Steffan resigned from the magazine, and I was left to my own devices. I had learned a lot about layout from Dan, and as I was besieged by interesting art, I was forced to continue meeting the high graphic standards he had set. This aspect of the magazine surprised me. Apparently there were a lot of good artists out there who longed for a chance to try something different. I published art by well-known people like J. K. Potter, Rick Berry, Rick Lieder, Matt Howarth, Brad Hamann, Ferret, and Freddie Baer. Over a hundred unknown artists appeared on the pages of the Eye as well. I hope I haven't given the impression that I considered the Eye to be the sole occupant of the critical niche. There have been a variety of critical magazines, and the ongoing argument is varied and robust. Among the ones that I read every issue of are: Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction, the most consistently entertaining of the academic magazines, due to their habit of publishing work by nonacademics—the biographical essay by Jack Dann in one issue fills me with editorial envy; the wide-ranging New York Review of Science Fiction, which manages to publish monthly material that stretches from the impenetrable to the shrill to the fascinating to the genuinely insightful (a mix I strive for myself); Proud Flesh, which incorporates the unfortunately named (and now defunct) Fuck Science Fiction into a journal that may shape up into the most uncompromising blast of street criticism in the field; Non-Stop Magazine, a periodical that promises to embrace the wildest of the fringe and the staidest of the old-timers under a single umbrella; and, for those of you tired of the amount of nonsense written about cyberpunk, and who still find that there is something worthy to say, Patrick Clark's Interference on the Brain Screen is the last genuine cyberpunk fanzine, and if Glenn Grant ever gets his next issue of Edge Detector published then he will most certainly raise everyone's standards another notch. There are more: Interzone is still running some of the best criticism around, and Asimov's and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction have expanded and diversified their critical voices. The more the better. To resurrect an old Dave Letterman line, "This is not a competition, it is an exhibition. Please, no wagering." Another surprising aspect of the growth of the Eye was the demographics. The Eye achieved a circulation of 5,000. Of that, half were outside of North America. Also, about half (as far as I can tell from correspondence) were not science fiction fans as the term is understood. These are people who have never heard of the Hugo Award, Worldcon, or Locus. Distributors and bookstores that had never stocked any sf-related periodical before began picking up the magazine. It seemed that my original mission, broadening the awareness of recursive sf fans, had transformed into something quite different. In some ways, the magazine was bringing adult sf to the attention of people wholly outside the claustrophobic sf community. This was the most unexpected and exciting development in the magazine's history. Beyond the simple success of the Eye, I find this very significant. There are people out there ready to read adult sf who just don't know it yet—people who have never

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considered picking their way through the Star Trek/Star Wars underbrush and hunting down the odd bits of genuinely challenging fiction. No sf publisher seems to have taken this under consideration in their marketing efforts, but they should. There is an untapped readership out there of unknown scope. The Eye progressed on, a decade after its birth, with submissions that were more interesting than ever. Each issue attracted another few hundred readers; the demographics mentioned above held steady. Due to other circumstances in my life, I've now been forced to place the Eye on indefinite hiatus, but people keep telling me that they are anxiously awaiting its return. Finally, the question of authority arrives. The magazine did seem to mutate into an authority of sorts, influencing what people read and believed about sf. This was indisputable, according to my correspondence, but came as a surprise to me. I saw the magazine as a semi-outside commentator; yet an authoritative role has been thrust upon it. I cannot attribute this to my editorial perspicacity, but to the freedom I allowed the writers. My insistence upon consideration of nonliterary topics was embraced with eagerness by many of my writers. The best writers responded to the challenge and demonstrated a satisfying awareness of the world beyond science fiction. If that small percentage of science fiction that is written for the adult reader is ever to take its rightful place as a component of literature at large, then two attitudes must be fostered in both writers and readers. Do not settle for a book that is pretty good, but perhaps with a little effort could have been great. Avoid recursivity at all costs. Writers and readers must keep their minds open to the entire spectrum of the arts and sciences. After my many years of publishing, the amorphity of my original motives has crystallized into these twin themes.

Chapter 9

Authorities, Canons, and Scholarship: The Role of Academic Journals Arthur B. Evans

Scholarly journals such as Science Fiction Studies, Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction, and Extrapolation which specialize in publishing academic criticism on science fiction are sometimes described as wielding a certain "authority" in the field. But how can such authority be defined? If it does exist, where does it come from? Over what or whom do they supposedly exercise it? And how does their perceived authority influence the canonization of certain science fiction texts instead of others? It might be claimed that any notion of "authority" automatically implies both an established hierarchy and the ownership of a certain power due to one's standing within that hierarchy. As managing editor of a scholarly journal, I willingly concede the first of these two implications. A piece of sf criticism published, for example, in one of the above-named scholarly journals is probably more likely to be "authoritative" (i.e., accurate and trustworthy) than if it were to appear in People magazine or Better Homes and Gardens. But I have substantial doubts about the second. Exactly what "power" do academic journals like Science Fiction Studies, Foundation, and Extrapolation really possess? Let us examine the facts. First, we serve a very small and very specialized sector of readers and literary scholars—so we do not exert any appreciable influence over sf fandom or public opinion in general. Second, we are not normally considered to be among those venerable, "prestigious" academic journals with tens of thousands of subscribers—so our influence on university officials in important matters such as tenure decisions and academic promotions is undoubtedly quite modest. And third, our financial status as nonprofit scholarly publications ranks us among the very poorest in the publishing industry—so we do not have any measurable economic power that might be used to sway contemporary publishing practices. To further illustrate this point, let me briefly explain how our editorial procedures work at SFS. First, a manuscript is received by any one of our five editors. That editor acknowledges receipt of it with an e-mail message, letter, or postcard to the author and then distributes a copy of the essay to the other four.

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After the essay has been read by all five editors, and if the majority of us feel it to be original, interesting, and appropriate for SFS, then one of the editors is assigned as editor-in-charge of the submission. At this point, the editor-in-charge can return the essay to the author and ask for revisions before sending it out to readers, or can choose to forward it straightaway to at least two of our SFS editorial consultants for a more thorough evaluation. Our readers can recommend to accept the essay as written (or with minor revisions), to reconsider it again only after major revisions, or to reject it outright. Whenever a manuscript is provisionally accepted but with revisions required (almost always the case), the editor-in-charge acts as intermediary between the author and the consultants to eventually bring the manuscript to its final form as page-proofs. This process could take from 2 to 3 months or 15 to 18 months or more, depending upon the revisions needed and the expeditiousness of the contributing author. It is only when this end-point in the editorial process has been reached—when the article is deemed acceptable by all parties involved—that it is officially accepted for publication in SFS. A contract is then issued to the author and the article is placed among those "To Be Published" in a forthcoming issue. If we as editors discern among such "To Be Published" articles certain possibilities of mixing and matching—that is, grouping together those which happen to target the same author, theme, or theoretical perspective, or perhaps juxtaposing certain essays which seem to act as point-counterpoint to each other—we often take advantage of such serendipitous occasions by lumping them together into the same issue, even if they were not originally scheduled to appear there. This particular authority we reserve to ourselves as editors—a kind of editorial privilege. But at no time do the SFS editors themselves enjoy special authorial privileges for the publication of their own research (whenever we find time to do it). Their own essays must follow the same editorial procedures as all others. In fact, more than once during the past few years, papers submitted by our own editors for publication in SFS have been either rejected or sent back for substantial modification. Thus, our editorial philosophy in this matter is quite simple and straightforward: we want the sf scholarship that we publish to be the best it can possibly be. Accordingly, we encourage our contributors to accept a large measure of outside collaboration in order to improve their original submissions. We ask them to understand that this (sometimes lengthy) editorial process is an important part of publishing in a refereed journal and that it is an essential ingredient to ensure a quality product. And we urge our contributors to work with us toward this goal. Looking back over the years, I must say that SFS has been extremely fortunate not only because of those many sf scholars who have chosen to become affiliated with the journal and continue to volunteer their time and expertise, but also because of the large number of contributors who have indicated to us that they value this unique opportunity to revise and fine-tune their work before publication (and who are patient enough to see it through until the end). But scholarly sf journals like ours feature more than just critical articles on science fiction: they also contain book reviews (which, at SFS, are restricted to

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monographs, bibliographies, encyclopedias, and other works of sf criticism). By their very nature, book reviews tend to be inherently authoritative. They render judgments of worth on a newly published title and advise the reader of its relative merit compared with other similar books in the field—that is, they establish a kind of hierarchy. Further, in contrast to critical articles, book reviews ostensibly have the potential to wield considerable economic power in the sf marketplace by encouraging the purchase of certain texts and discouraging the purchase of others. Publishing such reviews, of course, is one of the major functions of any scholarly journal. But, as with the editorial procedures used for critical articles, those books about science fiction received for review at SFS (when the publishers choose to send us a copy for review purposes) are promptly passed along by our book-reviews editor Rob Latham to scholars in the field who have a recognized expertise in that particular area or discipline; only they have the "authority" to judge its contents. Once again, the journal itself serves only as the mouthpiece through which such views are expressed—whether they be positive, negative, or neutral. Finally, it is sometimes argued that, because of their ability to bring into the limelight certain authors or subjects through their publication of "special issues," scholarly sf journals tend to manipulate and ultimately predetermine who and/or what becomes part of the science fiction canon. This may be true, but only partly so. There are a great many other factors involved—such as the self-regulating (and often ideological) mechanisms of the college curriculum itself, the easy availability of certain sf titles, the near impossibility of finding others that suddenly go out-ofprint, and so on—over which academic journals such as ours have no control. It is true that we do provide a venue for sf scholarship devoted to the study (and teaching) of a reasonably wide variety of sf authors and texts, and their appearance in our pages may well be viewed by certain literature professors as a prerequisite support-structure for including such fictional titles in their course syllabi in the first place. However, as mentioned earlier, the amount and nature of this critical scholarship is strictly a function of our contributors and what they choose to send to us, and what SFS designates as a "special issue" is, in most instances, one where we happen to receive several articles on the same topic or author and subsequently decide to present them together in the same issue. A few recent cases of such coincidental convergence, for example, include our special issue "On Star Trek" (Vol. 24, No. 72, July 1997) or, to a somewhat lesser extent, the March 1999 issue of SFS (Vol. 26, No. 77) which contains a number of essays and a book review collectively titled "On Science Fiction and Queer Theory." But there are times when we do announce a "special issue" without such presubmitted manuscripts in hand, and then solicit material for it. On these occasions, one editor (or one of our editorial consultants) usually makes an initial suggestion, the editors discuss its merits and, if they agree, he or she is given responsibility to gather together a number of submissions, send them out for review, help to edit them, arrange them in a series, and write a brief introduction for them. In the past few years, for example, Veronica Hollinger organized just such a special issue focusing on "Science Fiction by Women" (Vol. 17, No. 51, July 1990), Isrvan

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Csicsery-Ronay Jr. on "Science Fiction and Postmodernism" (Vol. 18, No. 55, November 1991), David N. Samuelson on "Hard Science Fiction" (Vol. 20, No. 60, July 1993), and Gary Westfahl on "A History of Science Fiction Criticism" (Vol. 26, No. 78, July 1999). More recently, our entire SFS editorial staff organized an ambitious two-volume special-issue series on "Global Science Fiction" (Vols. 2627, Nos. 79-80, November 1999 and March 2000). For these issues, the assigned editor(s) had not only the authority to select the best articles for inclusion, but also the responsibility to oversee their individual quality and appropriateness. The net effect of such special issues—both the coincidental ones and calculated ones—on the academic sf canon is difficult to ascertain. But, to the extent that such issues tend to focus more critical attention (i.e., give more publicity) to certain sf authors and works, and to the extent that teachers of science fiction might be more inclined as a result to include these authors and works in their courses, such special issues may indeed have some (albeit modest) influence on the canonization process. In an attempt to be more proactive in this matter, SFS conducted a survey in 1993 on the then-current state of the sf canon, and published its results in November 1993 (Vol. 20, No. 61). In this survey, we asked a few dozen of our sf consultants and friends to identify what they felt to be the five or ten most "Unjustly Neglected Works of Science Fiction." Our rationale for doing so was clearly explained in our cover letter where we stated: We have two goals in mind: 1) lists like this are entertaining in their own right; 2) we are conscious that SFS has concentrated on a sort of canon that has influenced other readers of SFS, and has led to a kind of self-reinforcing list of Great SF Works. We believe one good way to get out of our canonical rut is to alert SF critics to the sorts of texts we would be especially interested in. . . . (422) The results of this survey listed the following authors as "unjustly neglected" by sf criticism (in order of frequency cited): Cordwainer Smith, Poul Anderson, Joanna Russ, Brian W. Aldiss, Samuel R. Delany, Robert Silverberg, Theodore Sturgeon, the Strugatsky brothers, Alfred Bester, Carol Emshwiller, William Term, R. A. Lafferty, Robert Sheckley, A. E. van Vogt, Clifford D. Simak, David R. Bunch, and Bernard Wolfe, among others. We at SFS naturally assumed that this information would be very useful, and that it would hopefully motivate potential contributors to devote some critical attention to these heretofore unsung sf writers and works. But we were to be disappointed in this regard. During the years following the appearance of this survey, SFS continued to receive very few manuscripts on these particular authors—in spite of our clear indications that we were eager to publish such essays. Although it may be too soon to say definitively (after all, serious scholarship on "undiscovered" authors requires a certain amount of time), these efforts by SFS to expand the academic sf canon by direct intervention have, at least to date, borne no fruit. So what is the moral of this story? One might be tempted to conclude that such a lack of response says a great deal about the supposed "authority" held by scholarly journals over the academic sf canon. But time will tell. In either event, I firmly believe that the publication of a single classroom sf

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anthology like The Norton Book of Science Fiction invariably exerts a greater and longer-lasting influence on the academic sf canon than the learned criticism of all scholarly sf journals combined. A few years ago, SFS implemented yet another strategy to attempt to influence the existing sf canon, with results published in the November 1996 issue (Vol. 23, No. 70) titled "Science Fiction in Academe." We conducted an up-to-date survey of those sf courses being taught in North American colleges and universities. By publishing the findings of our broad-based poll—including actual course syllabi, bibliographies, and details of teaching methodologies—we hoped that our readers who regularly teach science fiction in their classes would have the opportunity to learn from their counterparts, and perhaps expand their own sf repertoire. We also sought to provide some concrete data to help clarify which authors and works seemed to be part of the contemporary sf canon, which are not, and why. Much like our earlier efforts, however, this attempt to directly influence the academic sf canon appears to have failed. But perhaps its effect cannot be truly measured until another, similar survey is conducted one day in the future and the results compared. Insofar as serving as "spokespersons for the field," I am sure that my editorial colleagues will agree with me when I state categorically that it is not something scholarly sf journals relish doing. How can any editor of an academic journal "represent" science fiction as a whole? And yet, in the commercial and expediencyoriented world of the media industry, we are sometimes asked (usually by telephone) to provide a 25-words-or-less extemporaneous summary of what science fiction (usually referred to by our interviewers as "sci-fi") is all about, why it is important, and where it seems to be heading. In other words, as managing editors of sf journals, we are singled out as some sort of "authority" on the subject—an honor that is not only dubious but also wholly undeserved. Nevertheless, we try our best to proselytize for the reading and study of science fiction and to convey at least a small glimmer of understanding about the vast scope and social importance of this often-misunderstood literary genre. But it must be understood that the tangible social impact of such quoted media blurbs remains, by and large, inconsequential. Finally, in terms of the type of sf scholarship that academic sf journals tend to promote, I will once again speak only for SFS—though I am sure that most of my observations tend to reflect the editorial philosophies of both Extrapolation and Foundation as well. We want articles that are intelligent, interesting, and original. We want articles that focus on works of science fiction, not fantasy or horror. Although we continue to accept articles on much-discussed authors like Stanislaw Lem, Philip K. Dick, and Ursula K. Le Guin, we especially welcome articles on any of the "Unjustly Neglected" science-fiction authors mentioned above. We also hope to see more articles on the history of sf, the sf of other countries, sf and the postmodern, feminism and sf, Utopian and dystopian sf, sf and race, sf and music, sf and linguistics, gay and lesbian sf, prehistoric sf, religious sf, the commercial sf industry, and so on. As a rule, we and our many editorial consultants normally reject articles that are poorly written, unreadable because of excessive jargon, or either too narrow in scope or too vague. We also reject those that seem excessively ad

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hominem, that lack critical depth, or that are simply too derivative and tread where so many others have already trod. In this arena, at least, we can justifiably be described as adhering to a particular "standard" and as exercising our editorial power to influence the shape of literary criticism in our field. So, in the world at large, what constitutes the real "canonical authority" of scholarly sf journals like Science Fiction Studies, Foundation, and Extrapolation! There is no obvious answer, apart from the individual perception of our readers. Because of the complex social dynamics involved, because of the different priorities at play in the disparate worlds of academe, the publishing marketplace, and the fandriven sf industry itself, and because psychology seems far more determinative in this matter than aesthetic judgment or economics, any amount of perceived influence and/or power may well be—like beauty—strictly in the eye of the beholder. But, in essence, isn't this where all "authority" truly originates?

Part III Case Studies in Marginalization


Chapter 10

Multiculturalism and the Cultural Dynamics of Classic American Science Fiction George Slusser

One of the most persistent players in recent academic arguments over canonization and marginalization is so-called "multiculturalism." The attitude of multiculturalists toward science fiction as a rule is either dismissive (it speaks for the dominant hegemonic class) or preemptory. In the latter sense, students are sent to find "minority" voices, and when these are not found, to do as Ursula K. Le Guin did in her The Norton Book of Science Fiction and invent them, incorporating writers by force under this heading whose stories do not conform to the generic expectations of the average reader. More interesting than the fact of a multiculturalist assault on sf is the question: why argue about sf? What power vested in sf is being challenged? It seems rather that the two contestants—multiculturalism and "classic American sf' (so named to distinguish it from Le Guin's "revisionist" kind)—are both responding to the same thing. They share, if nothing else, a common recognition of the failure of constitutional liberalism, as defined in the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution, in dynamic terms, as a drive to "form a more perfect union" by legislating universal rights, especially when the more abstract right to liberty is linked to a freedom to pursue happiness. However, both the multiculturalist and science-fictionist see the dynamics of American culture to lie not in universal but in special powers. What is more, there is further irony in the fact that both these visions—politically correct and politically incorrect alike—proclaim a dynamic that is basically similar: to promote equal opportunity as the means of generating necessary inequalities. Each is free, in the Napoleonic sense, to rise according to his or her talent. It is instead a matter of how "talent" is defined, and what use it serves. Is it an abstract entity, the means of bestowing some qualitative "empowerment"? Or is it instead something pragmatic, the means of doing something? It may seem strange to compare multiculturalism, a cultural "theory," with a literary form, which in relation to theory can only be its medium or vehicle of expression. Yet the master-narrative of sf operates on a strongly mythic level—the

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classic one of direct engagement between human individual and the forces of nature. Robert Bork sees multiculturalism in analogous fashion as having its own narrative, both a myth and "fantasy": "So powerful has the fantasy world of multiculturalism become that many of us have accepted the myth that only a minority person can understand the thoughts of a person of the same minority. That is a denial of the universality of human qualities."1 Bork may proclaim universals but is not really seeking them, as his defense of the pragmatic uniqueness of "Eurocentric" culture makes clear: "What needs to be said is that no other culture in the history of the world has offered the individual as much freedom, as much opportunity to advance."2 Both multiculturalism and sf, then, present a cultural dynamics that is expressed in a narrative manner. I wish to show that while multiculturalism is mired in contradictions generated by irreducible binaries—homogeneity and heterogeneity, or equal versus "special" rights— classic American sf generates a cultural dynamic based on an interaction of collective and individual forces that strives to escape the binary "trap." Multiculturalism may only be a new version of the utopian-dystopian impasse, whereas sf seems to embody an almost Emersonian undulation between power and form, where the source of power is openly the lawless individual and the counterbalancing element the social, cultural and legal forms that necessarily provide a field of action at any given time and place in the development of some future or alternate history. I will first discuss the multicultural dynamic and its claims for authority over the cultural worlds of sf. Then I will examine in contrast the Emersonian dynamic as it functions in Robert A. Heinlein's "The Man Who Sold the Moon" and Bruce Sterling's Islands in the Net. If it appears presumptuous to define "classic American sf' on the basis of two works, I defer to the multiculturalists, who are used to basing theories on no textual evidence whatsoever. The Global Vision and Multiculturalism The American Bill of Rights and French Declaration of the Rights of Man, despite their universalizing language, were not written with a global vision in mind. They emerged as the collective voice of peoples confident that their cultures were now ready and able to deliver, in a material sense, the promise of equal rights. We have learned today in the global context that it takes precious resources to give all peoples or cultures the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—in fact, it has proven an impossible task. The multiculturalists, however, act as if they are unaware of this; or perhaps on a deeper level, they are all too aware of it, aware that liberty is and remains a function of power, and that lines between haves and havenots can be redrawn but not erased. What then is the multicultural vision in this globalist age? On the first level suggested above, which I call the Utopian level, it resides in the proclamation that all cultures are of equal "worth," hence deserve equal "respect," and further deserve equal access to the rights of life, liberty, and

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pursuit of happiness. But do people, on this level, really want diversity of culture? A clue to "third world" needs can be found in the words to a reggae song by Mighty Diamonds: "Everybody Wants the Same Thing, Don't They?" The want list includes: shelter from the storm, to watch the game on Saturday. It is clear that the "freedoms" asked for are basic, and that they are material rather than cultural. We must remember it is not a culture expressing these needs, but a postcultural entity. Significantly, reggae calls itself "island music," and islands, more than nations or continents, have become today's synthesizers of culture. Drawing on African "roots" as cultural myths distanced by diaspora and exile while blending them with the fusion of cultures in U.S. pop music, Jamaican DJs and dubbers "mix" their sound on state-of-the-art Japanese electronics. They broadcast from the island to the world a pan-African "cultural" vision that is pure electronic Utopia. It is a good place that comes literally out of no place, and because this is so, remains free to go everywhere in the world. Multiculturalism on the second level may be equally a modern fantasy. As such, however, it taps the dystopian nightside of the Utopian dream, which seems to say that mankind is only free when it is in chains. This is the dimension that Charles Taylor, in his famous essay, calls "the politics of recognition." "Politics" is the key word, and multiculturalists at this level demand the power to legislate equal worth, and finally equal "rights," of which the ultimate is again, in Taylor's words, the "pursuit of happiness."3 But there is some confusion here: if the multiculturalists only seek to level the cultural playing field, what is the purpose of this, other than creating organized chaos? "Destabilization" may be tempting to intellectuals as a sort of inversion of the Founding Fathers' call for equal rights, a "postmodernist" site from which a new cultural dynamic will arise. But in demands to revalorize the cultures of formerly subject peoples, are they asking both for cultural and material parity, as if these were natural corollaries? To conflate (and thus confuse) these seems naive, but this is precisely the case with multiculturalists today. Consider this statement by Edward Said: "It is no exaggeration to say that liberation as an intellectual mission, born in the resistance and opposition to the confinements and ravages of imperialism, has now shifted from the settled, established, and domesticated dynamics of culture to its unhoused, decentered, and exilic energies, energies whose incarnation today is the migrant."4 Yet liberation is not just an "intellectual" mission, nor are migrants and the "unhoused" only "incarnations," phantasmic products of reflections on some Freudian unheimlich. They are real homeless people with no shelter from the storm whose migrations are not a decentering device, but a material problem reflecting overpopulation, changes in climate, depleted resources—conditions in part brought about, ironically, by the demands of certain liberal cultures for "equal rights." To Taylor, the disparities in this political mode of multiculturalism result from a conflict between "two notions of equal respect": For one, the principle of equal respect requires that we treat people in a difference-blind fashion. . . . For the other, we have to recognize and even foster particularity. The reproach the first makes to the second is just that it violates the principle of non-discrimination. The

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reproach the second makes to the first is that it negates identity by forcing people into a homogeneous mold that is untrue to them. This would be bad enough if the mold were itself neutral... . But . . . the claim is that the supposedly neutral set of difference-blind principles of the politics of equal dignity is in fact a reflection of one hegemonic culture. . . . Consequently, the supposedly fair and difference-blind society is not only inhuman (because suppressing identities) but also, in a subtle and unconscious way, itself highly discriminatory.5 As long as this conflict remains in the realm of "principles," we have Orwellian doublespeak: equality is discrimination, and special rights are in fact equal rights. The underlying factor here is not something "inhuman," but rather the all-toohuman fact of material inequality. In the pavane of power described above, "principles" do little more than obscure the Napoleonic fact that, in a "free" society, it is each according to his ability to pursue happiness, and according to the energy he puts into this pursuit, up to each individual to define the formal nature, the size and boundaries of this effort, whether it encroaches on others' personal space or not. Multiculturalism, if it speaks of "individuals," sees them figuratively, as parts representing a cultural whole. In terms of the cultural dynamic of classic sf—the Emerson-Heinlein dynamic—the "wholes" are not cultures. Cultures rather, in their necessary diversity, are elements to be shaped into a functioning whole by the empowered individual or "nonconformist." "A man Caesar is born, and for ages we have a Roman Empire," says Emerson.6 "Power" as well is taken in the Emersonian sense as the ceaseless activity of becoming of the "representative" not the "great" man, he who strives to become complete among partial men: "Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim."7 The result is an "institution" that, as with Rome to Caesar, is the lengthened shadow of the man. As such, institution precedes, and to a great degree, predisposes culture. A simplistic view of historical dynamics? No doubt, but it remains, both in classic sf and the culture that reads sf, a powerful and productive dynamic. To multiculturalists seeking to define hegemonies and relations of power, here is a force to be reckoned with, particularly troublesome because it is extracultural in nature.

"The Man Who Sold the Moon" Heinlein is my "representative" writer, and in a sense classic American sf is his lengthened shadow. Because he, and thus his institution, are often dismissed by multiculturalists as sexist and racist, I must approach his representative protagonist Delos D. Harriman and his selling of the Moon from a necessary byway: the naturenurture question. A major gambit of the multiculturalists is to equate diversity and equality on the level of nature. Building on the statement "all men are created equal," they extend the claim to say that all women and cultures are equal by nature, so unequal only by nurture. With no need to rectify laws of nature, their attention turns to the laws of culture; problems of race and gender, now seen as cultural


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matters, can be rectified by legislating compensatory privileges for "disadvantaged" groups. Indeed, the current substitution of the term "differently abled" for "disadvantaged" reveals the degree to which natural categories have been conflated with cultural ones. But Heinlein's process of cultural dynamics cannot be dismissed by simply naming it as eugenics, social Darwinism, or some other invidious "philosophy" of natural inequality. Again, now in terms of the nature-culture binary, Heinlein's vision can be glossed by an Emersonian concept. In the essay Nature, Emerson's fifth category for defining this term is "discipline," but this is not the Foucauldian category of establishing control over something—culture over nature or vice versa. Instead it describes an interactive, undulatory process whose dynamic emanates neither from a vitalist force nor a cultural group but from the representative individual. Nature disciplines us while we discipline it: "Space, time, society, labor, climate, food, the animals, the mechanical forces, give us sincerest lessons day by day, whose meaning is unlimited.... [on the other hand] our dealing with sensible objects is a constant exercise in the necessary lessons of difference, of likeness, or order, of being, of seeming."8 This interaction creates what Emerson calls a "galvanic circuit" between subject and object. The "statistical" result of many such circuits is not stasis, cultural equality, but rather cultural advancement, the ever-lengthening shadow of the most disciplined. Taylor, though arguing for equal recognition, cannot deny that this investment in multicultures must nevertheless "pay off in terms of human advancement. This is not what Susan Wolf, responding to Taylor's essay, wants to hear. She does not want any open process of cultural interaction, but calls for equality now by mandating cultural diversity to level claims to a "pay off that would valorize one culture over another. What she really demands, in the guise of equality, is the implementation of a special class privilege: she would teach white women to negotiate other cultures in libraries and schools, a skill, like learning Netscape, to give them a technological edge in dealing with a multicultural tomorrow. Technology, in the vision of classic American sf, does not destabilize, it transforms culture. John W. Campbell, Jr.'s "Introduction" to The Man Who Sold the Moon heralds this collection of stories (to which the title story is central) as the "first volume of the Future History Series." In this proposed history, Campbell does envision an interaction of culture and technology, but he gives primacy to the latter as a dynamic force: The cross-influence of cultural patterns and mores on technological background is one of the prime fields of exploration for science fiction. The invention of the cotton gin made unnecessary the slave-labor engaged in separating cottonfromthe seeds—but so cheapened and increased the demand for cotton that more slaves were needed for the field work. Had an efficient mechanical cotton-picker and weed-killer, like those available today, been invented in 1850 . . . an entirely different cultural pattern would have grown up in the South.9 Campbell concedes the "influence" is sometimes the other way around ("The

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invention of the machine to produce zippers is dependent on the social custom of wearing complex clothing"), but the example is trivial. The important thing is that it is in all cases a question of some invention. Campbell speaks of a third factor in the technology-culture relationship which he calls "human nature." To the Heinlein of these stories, though, this term was as odious as it is to the multiculturalist. It is a group term. And if in each of these stories mankind is changed in some way, this is the result of "inventions" that are the work of an individual. Indeed, the idea of "future history" is not only an afterthought, an artificial grid thrown over an organically produced series of stories, but its strong implication of progressive advancement belies the sort of Emersonian zig-zag we see emerging from this series of men thinking and doing. Just as Emerson says of his Lords of Life—"I name them as I find them in my way"—so the activity of Heinlein's nonconformists has no visible telos. Where Campbell uses such concepts as social groups and human "nature," Heinlein presents individuals who are less genetically than "democratically" elected to represent human potential. They do not pursue happiness, nor special privilege, greed or power (the "classic" Heinlein found both pursuits debilitating and futile). They simply, in the active Emersonian sense, pursue. Theirs is the passion for advancement whose means is technology redefined as Man building his future. The title "The Man Who Sold the Moon" is curious in its mixture of Emersonian subject and past tense—the man is not selling the moon but has already sold it. Protagonist Harriman does in the story "sell" the moon, but this is not an end in itself, rather a way to do something else—sending men to the moon, and going there himself, becoming the Man in the Moon, as he puts it. Harriman wants to take one step, and one step only, in what he hopes will be an endless movement outward to the stars. His selling of the moon demonstrates that he is not an "imperialist" or swindler but again one of Emerson's representative men, chosen or "elected" for this task by what Myron Simon calls a "democratized Calvinism" which turned the doctrine of limited salvation into a revelation of "the common man's infinitude."10 Just as democracy ("equal rights") is the level playing field that allows for certain people who possess what Simon (paraphrasing Emerson) calls "the joyous sense of being specially favored," so Harriman takes the dictum that "the Moon belongs to everyone" and makes it the means by which he alone hopes to take possession, to physically occupy, this common ground. In a sense his "selling" the moon reverses the original imperialist partage of the virgin American land that the multiculturalists see as subtending the Constitution. He proves in reverse that, behind claims for equality today in terms of rights, respect, or "ownership" of the Earth and its satellite, each group, culture, nation seeks to grab what it can when the whole is put up for sale. Harriman does this however to set forth anew a cultural entity of which he by his very name is a vital incarnation. "Delos" is an odd name for this American entrepreneur. Delos, an island five kilometers in diameter, was site of the Delian League, where Greek states joined to expel the Persians under Athenian rule. The small unit, the city-state, forms a multicultural league, which however glorious, proves ephemeral, as the center loses cohesive force and the unit disperses in


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factions. Here it is not that no man is an island but that all men are islands—though some, like Delos, prove more resonant and powerful. What Heinlein's Delos will invest is the new satellite state Luna City, an island in the sky that will, like the Delian League, be a fusion culture, drawing on all territory-bound Earth nations, yet stateless, powerful only by means of its mobility. This new entity, as a model for the state in the new information age, could be said to incarnate Emerson's transparent eyeball—it is nothing, but it sees all. Heinlein's "portrait" of Harriman, his representative man as entrepreneur, details the actions of a person who sets himself up as greater than societies, cultures, laws. This portrait is not in the satirical and "classical" vein of Fielding's Jonathan Wild, where a modern pretense to greatness is subject to the restraints of an ancient moral code. Such a figure is, and must remain, a dwarf on the shoulders of giants; nor is it the defeatist "tragic" portrait of the self-made man and Western frontier myth we find in Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. In fact, the fate of Jay Gatsby could be read as a multiculturalist fable. Here the European who violates the virgin West discovers, along with material success, cultural emptiness. But Gatsby is literally a man between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born. His past is the East. (Is this not true for all Europeans?) It is a world that has forever lost its promise. Indeed, this "fresh, green breast of the new world" seems never to have offered anything but an invitation to rape and plunder. While the West and East Egg of the action are emblems of the sterility of this European past, the name of Delos D. Harriman is in itself an incarnation of cultural continuity in change. But James Gatz the self-made man is forced to change his name to Gatsby. In doing so, he trades his pursuit of the green light of future and frontier for the light on the end of Daisy's dock, marking an unbreachable distance between the democratic promise of pursuit of happiness, and irresolvable class and cultural differences. The sense of wonder of these Europeans in the "new world" of America is over before it began in The Great Gatsby. To reach for the future is to be "borne back ceaselessly into the past," a past of diverse cultures that they themselves deny, or they would not try to impose a single mold on the varied cultures of a place that rejects them, will not let them grow "roots." Fitzgerald's vision feeds multiculturalism. But other than defeat of cultural "hegemony," the novel offers no alternate dynamic. But Heinlein's story, in a sense, responds to this defeat. Harriman reveals that both "tycoon" and sense of wonder are still active forces. His "green light" is the moon: "I'm going to the Moon! If I have to manipulate a million people to accomplish it, I'll do it!"11 Heinlein's story, written in 1950, is a "prequel" to his 1940 story "Requiem," which recounts how an old Harriman, the man who established moon travel and Luna City, persuades two superannuated rocket men to take him to the moon, where he dies. The worldview of the story, with an epigraph from Robert Louis Stevenson's poem, is perhaps that of the nineteenth-century imperialist who is driven physically (like Stevenson on Samoa) to reach the "place he longed to be," the distant treasure island that he claims in death as "home." But a vast distance separates the Harriman of "Requiem" from the protagonist of "The Man Who Sold

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the Moon." H. Bruce Franklin simplifies by seeing this Harriman not as an Emersonian representative man but as a "superimperialist" like Cecil Rhodes, whose "companies . . . owned much of the resources of southern Africa."12 In this story, a multinational power syndicate has already rendered national governments, as territory-based entities, ineffectual if not obsolete. Harriman is no Rhodes, however; rather than head a corporation, he exploits his partners for what in the truest sense are personal ends. He proclaims, "nationalism should stop at the stratosphere." What replaces the state is not the corporation, but the individual in the literal sense: "Well, if I own i t . . . I won't misuse i f (169). The question here however is what does "ownership" mean in this case? How can someone who has not possessed (in the sense of the elder Harriman) something pretend to "sell" it, and what exactly is he selling? "The Man Who Sold the Moon" is not a story of deeds, but a story of manipulations, to use Harriman's word, of "intangibles." In the spirit of the Emersonian dictum that "what is good is effective, generative," Harriman displays purest energy in maneuvering elements of a multinational, even postnational, world to his own design. Delos is an island in larger grids of "power structures." These entities however—national and corporate alike—are gridlocked: the two superpowers, as dominant land masses, are at a standoff; and the energy cartel, due to failure of a new fuel source, has tightened its grid on the world economy. Neither can move in new directions, or respond to the thrust of individual energy. So Delos turns to a more flexible and malleable web: the United Nations. He wants to own the moon. The only possible proof of ownership of such an intangible, a thing no one has touched physically or set foot on, is to sell it as an intangible. His scheme, based on the fictions of real estate law, defines ownership of the moon as ownership of the Earth land it moves across in its trajectory. As the Moon's path is almost entirely over "southern," hence third world nations, Harriman plans set up private land conglomerates in these nations to buy and control what nobody yet values or wants: "rights" to the moon. Once this is done, he persuades his associates to finance a private rocket flight to the moon. In turn he offers new intangibles to moon "owners": mineral "rights" for hypothetical diamonds and uranium; broadcasting and advertising franchises; even philatelic and collectible products, given value by the claim that they have "been there." The southern nations awakened to the value of moon ownership will "nationalize" Harriman's companies, only making the "product" more valuable in the eyes of superpowers who "own" little if any of the fly-over territory. Now Harriman, who has acquired a nonprofit, UN-chartered corporation, will appeal to this same UN to intervene and prevent potential strife between superpowers and southern nations. This results in Harriman declaring his lunar colony an autonomous territory under UN protection: The reason we get all this is because the major states in the UN can't think up a claim that sounds as legal as the claim made by the tropical states, they can't agree among themselves as to how to split up the swag if they were to attempt brute force and the other major states aren't willing to see the United States claim the whole thing. They'll take the easy way out

Slusser: Multiculturalism

and Cultural

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of their dilemma by appearing to retain title in the UN itself. The real title, the title controlling all economic and legal matters, will revert to us. (168) Franklin sees here an egregious apology for "imperialist" exploitation of third world nations. On one level, this may be true. But in terms of the cultural dynamics in this story, Heinlein outlines a model that is not only sophisticated, but perhaps even in advance of today's postindustrial consciousness. Harriman can manipulate, even "deconstruct," structures of order because he realizes such structures are themselves intangibles. Against the reigning status quo of two superpowers, he invokes the rival network of "bodies," the not merely multinational and (given changing ideas of what comprises "nationhood") multicultural structure implied by the UN charter. Harriman activates a process Alvin Toffler will describe 30 years later in The Third Wave: "As the third wave thunders across the earth the nation state—the key political unit of the Second Wave era—is being squeezed by vicelike pressures from above and below." 13 Harriman's "wave" across the globe is the intangible shadow of the moon trajectory, a wave that literally forces the UN to define the nature of its grid of entities. It forces, and swiftly resolves, an issue that Toffler could only foresee in 1980: "We can expect a tremendous struggle to break out within the United Nations over whether that organization shall remain a 'trade association of nation-states,' or whether other types of units—regions, perhaps religions, even corporations or ethnic groups—should be represented in it" (327). Harriman proclaims, under the UN charter, the sovereignty of his lunar corporation. He then offers, as its governing principle, one inimical to any sort of control grid, even the complex one of a multicultural UN: "We'll sell anything but vacuum. We'll even sell vacuum" (174). The actual field of operation of this master of intangibles is in the empty spaces between clashes between nations, cultures, corporations. By manipulating the concept of "equal rights," Harriman reveals it to be a vacuum, a void to be filled by the individual as new source of generative power: "You are the intangible asset, Delos. You are the goose that lays the golden eggs" (234). From such "eggs" will emerge new energies, and a new formal circumference, which Harriman sees as contact with potential (hence intangible) alien races, the x factor that in turn would fill the void of cosmic loneliness, isolated Cartesian reason in a universe of extended things. In this sense, the Delos of "Requiem" is a throwback to the Second Wave world, that of landed or tangible possession, pinning your epitaph on the place itself. Here Delos does not care if the stamps he sells were canceled on the moon or not, as long as people believe they were. He is neither a Cecil Rhodes, nor a Robert Louis Stevenson; in the final scene he is described looking like "Moses must have looked, when he gazed out over the promised land" (238). Like Moses, he will not get there. Nor will his endless successors, because there is no "there" to be reached. There is only the striving to cast the net ever wider.

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Islands in the Net On the surface, the cultural dynamic of Bruce Sterling's Islands in the Net, with its postindustrialist feel, is as friendly to multiculturalism as Heinlein's vision is inimical. Beneath that surface, however, Sterling's narrative is little more than a transposition of Heinlein to the world of Netscape. To see this, look briefly at an intermediary, in many ways opposite vision—that of Samuel R. Delany. Delany, a fine close reader of Heinlein, began in the late 1960s to use the motif of islands and moons in his fiction. In Nova, the intergalactic historian Katin is a lover of moons: "A moon . . . to retire to some beautiful rock, my art perfected, to contemplate the flow and shift of the net; that's what I want, Mouse. But the subject won't come."14 Katin's moon is only a reflective surface, a transmitter with nothing to transmit. If Heinlein, for different reasons, does not finish his "future history," Katin never begins it. Harriman as island is a center that generates power, the moon is the reach of that power: subject and object are joined in that undulating system Emerson called a "galvanic circuit." In Nova, the relation between moon and island is reversed. It is the object that seeks its subject, Katin needs Mouse as his subject; Mouse however is not, as subject, a source of power that generates form; as a space gypsy, he is instead a body that enfolds a multitude of races and cultures, an androgyny of genders. In his physicality, he is the opposite of the intangible spaces that Harriman manipulates. Relation between center and circumference, moon and island, is here a game of cat and mouse. Another Delany novel, Triton, is about a moon to the exclusion of a planet. Again there is inversion of Heinlein's dynamic, where the moon is merely a relocating of the center, from which a new (and necessarily broader) circumference will expand. In Delany's novel, exploration turns inward on the subject, the moon as "body." As the epigraph from Mary Douglas suggests, the galvanic circuit here is the relation between physical and social experiences of the body, as the latter constrains the former and the former in turn breaks the restraints. The epigraph to Appendix B, from Foucault's Les mots et les choses, offers another cultural inversion: here from Utopia—Harriman's looking toward eventual contact is now, in Delany, Katin looking down in moon isolation on some "fantastic untroubled region"—to heterotopia. Here, where body confronts society, we have forces that "shatter or tangle common names . . . destroy syntax in advance," in other words take away the net that "holds things together."15 Such a dynamic of deconstruction is friendly to the academic multiculturalist, one of which Delany has become. But it is not what Sterling means by either island or net. Sterling's analysis of global or "postindustrial" cultural dynamics is both more classic (in Heinlein's vein) and more complex. He creates a sprawling Third Wave infoculture where war and want are less deconstructed than "dissipated" by a dynamic of global information sharing on the "web." In this society, groups and individuals are, in Toffler's words, "prosumers," who work for themselves, not for some "system" or consumer economy. Each builds his own ecology or electronic den. From this many homes arises a "practopia," a structure that "embraces (rather


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than suppresses) racial, regional, religious and subcultural variety" (Toffler, 358), yet one where, as these diversities reach out via infospace to form the web or "net," potential national or ethnic conflicts are diffused through constant exchange and flow of information. Sterling presents the Net as a culture offlow-throughpositions: for example, airports offer "Global islands in a net of airline flight paths" with traffic control keeping complex and diverse elements moving in an orderly manner.16 His heroine Laura Webster belongs to a global conglomerate called the Rizome—suggesting the Greek rhizoma or "rootstalk," thus the interface between the network of shoots above ground and the tangle of roots below. True to its name, this is a corporation of prosumptive individuals whose sole commodity is control of access points or information nodes. Harriman's intangibles, his vacuum, are now the links for exchange of data, something which Sterling tells us "has no substance" (43). Harriman openly admits to manipulating his intangibles, but Sterling offers a depersonalized world where each individual entity submits to the Net and moves within it rather than diverting it to personal interests. In practopia, it seems, all men are islands, yet no man remains an island. Yet, behind the rhetoric, Rizome still functions like Heinlein's Second Wave power syndicate. Its board of directors merely plays at postindustrialism. Like a secret lodge, members spend their lives in "modest" occupations (12)—Laura keeps a hotel in Galveston, and her husband David carries carpenter tools and work clothes, repairing and rebuilding on the local level like Jimmy Carter and Habitat for Humanity, even when on a high diplomatic mission. The cosmopolitan and multinational board meets at retro-rustic retreats in rural Tennessee, dressed in hippie pastoral or neo-okie drag, like Marie Antoinette at the Petit Trianon. Behind this pretense, they are nonetheless power brokers, directing and controlling traffic on the Net. From one of these figures we hear that "creativity comes from small groups. Small groups gave us the electric light" (47). Yet the word "creativity" proves a euphemism for "power," both in the sense of generating new things and the old Darwinian sense of dominance—two aspects that Harriman understood well. Sterling's world is one where small things have indeed brought big changes. Discovery of "single cell protein" led to the land no longer being farmed and to abundant synthesized foods to feed an ever-burgeoning population. Still, in this apparently open and self-policing world of food and information for everyone, rival entities still struggle for dominance. These entities, as once the small "island" states moved to destabilize the older, unwieldy national powers, have now, in a net of islands, found smaller and more intangible niches to operate from. There are "data pirates" who manipulate and divert information to private ends, like the EFT Commerzbank, based in tiny Luxembourg, that "drew its roots mainly from the old heroin networks of the south of France," and whose "illegal nerve centers" have been relocated in Turkish Cyprus (43). Or there is Singapore, hiding pirate activities on the even less conspicuous "sovereign Pacific island" of Nauru. The Grenadians locate synthetic food factories on large floating boats off their tiny coastline. Sterling's global Net sports increasingly elusive interstices, and from these rogue

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groups still vie for global power. The vision is one of Utopia and heterotopia, of construction and deconstruction. Laura's travels as Rizome agent take her to Grenada, Singapore, then to a submarine belonging to a mercenary group with the James Bondian name of FACT, and finally to Mali, an island in the midst of the Sahara desert. Grenada is a mix of offshore bankers and Rastafarians (a landless and mediatized "religion"). Singapore is a neonationalist city-state, a new Sparta with army and space program. Mali is a dying African "nation," its borders set arbitrarily in shifting sands, run by renegade meres who have scavenged obsolete nuclear subs and bombs. Finally, in the mapless realm of the Tuaregs, the ultimate nomads, Laura meets the ex-California surfer and Special Forces Colonel Jonathan Gresham, who calls himself a "postindustrial tribal anarchist" (388). All these apparently heterotopian elements seem, as bodies emerging from the grid of cyberspace, intractable to any organization whatsoever. Yet in Sterling's world, the most effective power, which most significantly affects the nature of circumferential form, remains the energized "representative" individual. Beneath the cultural dynamic of Sterling's islands in the net lie what Toffler describes as the "dissipative structures" of chaos theory. But the thrust of this, in Toffler's view, is not deconstruction, a nihilistic leveling of the playing field for its own sake, but rather the Prigoginian hope of "order out of chaos": "Whether the result of the runaway internal fluctuations or of external forces, or both, this breakup of the old equilibrium often results not in chaos or breakdown, but in the creation of a wholly new structure at a higher level" (307). One can see how the Emersonian dynamics of Heinlein's Harriman can be calqued on this form of chaos theory. For as Toffler says, chaos theoreticians, in terms of effective dynamics, look for small rather than "big" events: instead of a linear process of historical causality, they look for "spontaneous formation of [new] coherent structures," changes that emerge from feedback loops set in motion by some otherwise unnoticed action or event. So it is that an Emersonian man like Harriman, a being of no visible importance, is "chosen." In terms of Toffler's sense of chaos, there are analogies between the dynamics of dissipative structures and the unpredictable mystery of Calvinist election underlying the Emersonian process of power and form. Laura, despite seeming adherence to the credo of Rizome as a gemeinschaft, reveals in her actions that her company mission soon turns into a personal "power trip." To some degree, if Harriman is Emerson's representative man operating in the age of space expansion, Laura is representative woman in an age of information and dissipative structures. As befits her age, she is an ironic version of Harriman. Though she is moved around in utterly random fashion (she endures dropping of paper-clip bombs in Grenada, street riots and terrorism in Singapore, prison and flight in Mali, capture by Tuaregs in the Sahara), she remains oblivious to the lessons of chaos and feels an increasing desire to do something "big," to cast her shadow over a world perceived to be in need. Just as Harriman tells us his practical actions are motivated by an almost "romantic" desire to save the human race from loneliness, so Laura wants to act in the name of a "better" humanity, a totally futile, even deluded reason given the reality of her world.


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The key scene is Laura's meeting with Jonathan Gresham in the middle of the desert. She has discovered the coverup of the Malian bomb by the Vienna Accord forces, that the policers of the Net are not neutral arbiters of free access and thus equal rights, but are forced to play power politics to maintain equilibrium. For her, the ideological "purity" of the Net has been violated, and she wants to inform what she thinks will be an outraged world. Gresham, as her dark twin, the other Harriman, the realist who lies at the heart of her do-gooding posture, jokingly refers to himself and Laura as "cultural meddlers" (364). Her "need" to speak out is not only hypocritical, but a danger in terms of the real dynamics of the net as complex topology of human actions: "I don't live in your world," he told her. . . . "But if you want to go back, and be-who-youare, and live your cozy life in that whole world of yours, you'd better not try to kick its jams out. Maybe I could survive a stunt like that, ducking and dodging out here in the desert, but I don't think you could. The world doesn't give a shit how noble your motives are—it'll roll right over you." (356) Gresham reveals that he too once had grand designs to shape history, but he expresses them in language as violently destructive as hers is messianic: "I love war, Laura . . . . Somewhere inside me, I wanted Armageddon, and this is as close as it ever got" (365). Unlike Laura, however, he realizes the irony of being the representative man, of the individual's relation to power and form, at a more theoretical level: "I'm not innocent enough to let chaos alone. I stink of the Net, Laura. Of power and planning and data, and the Western method, and the pure inability to let anything alone. . .. The Net lost Africa once . . . but the Net will get it back someday. Green and pleasant and controlled, and just like everywhere else" (365-66). There is here, at one and the same time, an indictment of Heinlein's man and (by a double twist of irony) a salute to his necessity in the all-powerful equations of chaos. For neither Laura nor Gresham can leave chaos alone, and their actions prove necessary, if not for any cause of Utopian control or apocalyptic end, if there is to be dynamic change in this Net-dominated world menaced with stagnation and loss of transformational power. In Gresham's speech, the only alternative to a green paradise of a controlled Africa is a return to uncontrolled nature. Either way, the result is something apparently accidental and unexpected: "You know when it really got bad here? When they tried to help. With medicine. . . . And the eight, nine children that African women have borne from time immemorial—they all lived\" (365). In the end, Gresham (despite a seemingly superior grasp of the dynamics of dissipative structures) remains what he accused Laura of being: a comfortable creature of the Net, playing Lawrence of Arabia to the media and inspiring Rizome to sell the "Jonathan Gresham Look" (391) to biker-consumers in a bored America. It is Laura who, with the fervor of a Harriman, is driven to act—to tell her story on video camera and broadcast it randomly throughout the net from an obsolete yet still orbiting Russian space station: " 'It's too big for me to hold anymore,' she said. T've got to tell it. Now. That's all I know.' . . . She became pure glass, a conduit.

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No script, she was winging it, but it came out pure and strong. Like it would carry her forever. The truth, pouring through" (357). The language here is oddly Emersonian. As with Emerson, this is no act to end all acts but simply a small one, that as with the random Lords of Life, and in accordance with the dynamics of chaos, begins a process of change, collapses one Net, and begins forming some other, yet unknown structure. Like Harriman's Moses looking out on the strange new world of space travel he will not participate in, Laura stands with her Rizome associate on the balcony of an Atlanta high-rise in the final scene of the novel, witnessing the beginning of something new. Hiroshima has been rebombed, the health-food-conscious Rizome are taking out stashed cigarettes and liquor, the streets of formerly staid Atlanta are suddenly filled with screaming and revelling hordes. Laura's action changed things, but in ways that can no more be plotted in advance than the patterns of Heinlein's open-ended and never-finished "future history." Conclusion In another landmark essay on multiculturalism, K. Anthony Appiah regrets that multicultural politics is creating demands that "I organize my life around my 'race' or my sexuality."17 These categories he calls "scripts," scenarios for living forced upon the individual as the alternative for not being recognized at all. The politics of recognition becomes then the "politics of compulsion," and Appiah asks not to be forced to choose between this binary, but wants other, "personal" options. The "personal," he says, falls somewhere between the "secret" and the "not too tightly scripted." To find such a field of operation, he might profitably turn to the works of classic American sf discussed above. I have tried to demonstrate how Heinlein's and Sterling's characters acknowledge such cultural scripting (indeed Harriman preempts the "scripts" critics like Franklin would impose on him by naming and rejecting roles like "robber baron"), but in the end, for better or worse, step out of such scripts and allow the dynamic of the "personal" to function. When Appiah speaks of organizing his life around "race," he speaks of a prescripted circumference that inscribes the self. In contrast, Heinlein and Sterling empower or liberate the "secret" power of the person as Emerson's representative man, the center that generates its own circumference, creates its own form. Sf then, so often dismissed by liberal thinkers as "hegemonic" or "fascist," proves at least that across a span of 40 years (or an even vaster sweep from Emerson to Toffler and "chaos theory") it can offer a subtle investigation of cultural dynamics. The dynamics of "The Man Who Sold the Moon" and Islands in the Net not only subsumes multiculturalism, but also offers a powerful "option" to the gridlocked multiculturalist today, one deeply rooted in the American experience, in its ongoing attempt to define concepts like power and form and individualism in a nation obliged by principle to wrestle with the problem of equal rights.

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Notes 1. Robert Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), 36. 2. Bork, 61. 3. Charles Taylor, "Multiculturalism and 'The Politics of Recognition,' " in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 25-73. Essay originally published in 1992. 4. Edward Said, "The Politics of Knowledge," Raritan 1 (September 1991), 26. 5. Taylor, 43. 6. Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance," in American Literature I, ed. George McMichael (New York: Macmillan, 1974), 1325. 7. Emerson, 1329. 8. Emerson, 1283. 9. John W. Campbell, Jr., "Introduction," in Robert A. Heinlein, The Man Who Sold the Moon (Chicago: Shasta Publishers, 1950), 13. 10. Myron Simon, introduction to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Representative Man (New York: J. Simon, 1988), 13. 11. Robert A. Heinlein, "The Man Who Sold the Moon," in The Man Who Sold the Moon (Chicago: Shasta Publishers, 1950), 163. Later page references in the text are to this edition. 12. H. Bruce Franklin, Robert A. Heinlein: America as Science Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 72. 13. Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave (New York: Morrow, 1980), 311. Later page references in the text are to this edition. 14. Samuel R. Delany, Nova (Garden City: Doubleday & Co., 1968), 155. 15. Delany, Triton (New York: Bantam Books, 1976), 345. 16. Bruce Sterling, Islands in the Net (1988; New York: Ace Books, 1989), 77. Later page references in the text are to this edition. 17. K. Anthony Appiah, "Identity, Authenticity, Survival: Multicultural Societies and Social Reproduction," in Guttman, Multiculturalism, 163.


Chapter 11

Science Fiction in the Academies of History and Literature; Or, History and the Use of Science Fiction Farah Mendlesohn

Among the forces affecting the canonization and/or marginalization of science fiction works are arguments in the academic community over purpose, methodology, and approach. Although the rise of cultural studies has brought a greater diversity of viewpoints, academic consideration of science fiction—both through teaching and research—remains dominated by literary criticism both in the relevant journals (Science Fiction Studies, Extrapolation, and, to a lesser extent, Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction), and in courses offered by universities in both the United States and the United Kingdom.x However, there are benefits to be gained by introducing alternative approaches and methodologies to science fiction criticism. This chapter intends to introduce a historical understanding to the subject and to offer an alternative academic context for the study of science fiction. The first advantage which the historian brings to a study of science fiction is that she is not obliged to justify her choice of material by its quality but may select it simply on the grounds that it was read and written by and in an interesting context. This removes the need to examine closely the construction of text and choice of language which frequently excludes older (1926-1960) and "pulp" sf from critical canons, but it does require that other justifications of interest or value structures be defined. Science fiction after 1926 was the product of a particular section of the American middle-class as it emerged into a modern, technocratic society. Science fiction is in a position to provide, if not a unique form of source material for the social and cultural historian, then one that provides a window on an otherwise surprisingly difficult group to access—the white middle-class male for whom American society is supposedly constructed but who is predominantly a consumer rather than a producer of ideology. A study of fictive speculation within a consciously defined genre, a genre that increasingly throughout this period is conscious of its target audience,2 allows the reconstruction of a composite picture

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of the attitudes of the concerned—but not necessarily politically active—managerial and scientific middle-class.3 In order to demonstrate the process, I have chosen to focus upon one major political issue of the 1930s—the maintenance and nature of peace—selecting for the purpose a number of short stories from the dominant magazine of the period, Amazing Stories. The 1930s was a period of social and political turmoil both in the United States and in Europe. Accepted models of social and political organization were under threat from both the left and right, from both inside and outside government. For those who remained generally supportive of the social structure the ideological turmoil presented peculiar problems: a desire to support the status quo yet also a need to support reform in the face of the devastation of the depression and the political uncertainties of the international scene. In the late 1940s with exposure to the consequences of "extremism" in the battlefields and concentration camps of Europe coupled with the threat of Soviet power, the American middle class opted for the political quietude which is so noticeably a feature of "golden age" sf. In the 1930s, however, even the most conservative groups appear to have been active in a dialogue of change. Science fiction, better seen as a product rather than a critic of social patterns, is no exception. Amongst the educated middle-class of the 1920s and 1930s a major political issue was peace, peacekeeping, and the nature of peace. One indication of this was the large number of pro-peace (or at least antiwar/isolationist) organizations which emerged in the early twentieth century and the large-scale support which revolutionary propositions like the Ludlow amendment were able to mobilize.4 Unsurprisingly science fiction, because of its ability to embrace those global issues which weigh down or elude the grasp of mainstream fiction, quickly incorporated such issues into both background and plot. The breadth of political opinion on display suggests that, unlike science fiction writers of the 1950s, the sf writers of the 1930s were less inclined to follow a party line. In Amazing, we can read the work of the absolute pacifist, the isolationist, and the internationalist advocate of rearmament. Taken together they help construct a picture of the complexity of middle-class concern and understanding of peace during the 1930s. For the science fiction writer who wanted to find background material for a future society or a context for a future war story, there was no shortage of political controversy. What marks out the peace politics of the 1920s and 1930s for the peace historian is that for the first time the very nature of peace had come under discussion. Previous to World War I, "Peace" as it was usually understood by philosophers and diplomats related entirely to international conflict and was established by the settlement of boundaries and jurisdictions. The Russian revolution, President Wilson's advocacy of self-determination, American popular opinion's opposition to European imperialism, the hostility to the Versailles Treaty, and the international depression had generated new questions for which sf writers were keen to offer answers. Early science fiction has no reputation for radicalism, and this is not the place to start making one, but in the early 1930s, with the United States and the world in

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the grip of industrial depression and with populism on the rise, the apparent absence of social and economic justice for large portions of the American and European population seemed to many concerned citizens a serious threat to peace. Despite, or perhaps due to, the Red Scares of the 1920s the scope for political commentary appears to have been wide, certainly wide enough to entertain a certain amount of left-leaning liberalism. Harl Vincent's "Power," a lengthy story for Amazing in 1932, demonstrated both the social concern that existed in the American middle class and the technocratic paternalism that colored it. In an industrial/capitalist dictatorship, hero Scott Terris is the "good scientist" blind to the hardship inflicted upon the "greys" (or Proles) by those who wear the purple. Coming upon a "grey" using his lab he agrees to a tour of the city and is shocked to see the condition of the workers. He joins the revolution for the sake of his "grey" friend who is injured by an "agitator" and in order to prevent the grey "extremists" from taking over. The revolution intends to introduce a new form of energy generation to challenge the monopoly held by the energy company, whose stockholders form the de facto governing class. The consequent redistribution of political as well as electrical power from "purple" stockholders to "grey" proles will, it is envisaged, grant political power to the people. In actuality, Vincent quickly backs down from this radical premise, and it is Terris, the hero drawn from the purple, who takes control of the new energy form and uses it to recreate a meritocracy, a meritocracy which inevitably has some nice surprises for the hero—the grey woman with whom he falls in love turns out to be the illegitimate daughter of one of the few members of the purple who "makes good" after the revolution. Although Vincent displays a relatively sophisticated analysis of the nature of political inequality, the story rarely steps beyond the concerns and fears of the educated middle class. Social injustice is a wrong in part because of the potential threat to the peace of civil society, and it is the need to preserve this peace that is behind the middle-class faith in benevolent dictatorship, both in the story and in the reality of the 1930s. The original hero, the young "grey," is potentially too frightening for a middle class readership as are his working class colleagues. Even the Council of Five who are in charge of the revolution must be removed in order to allow a safer man to engage in a technocratic and meritocratic dictatorship. In the fine tradition of benevolent dictators, Terris of course "nationalizes" the new power industry and returns the state to popular control at the end of the story. Along with domestic concerns, the need for economic and social justice in international relations also provided material for the pulp writer; the ever-popular "future war" story ensured that. The emergence of America as the leading creditor nation in the interwar years created problems in the European balance of power. Had the U.S. been willing to take on an equivalent political responsibility, many difficulties which arose might have been resolved, and with more alacrity and sympathy. But America after World War I was in the grip of a strong anti-European feeling which, even among internationalists, placed strict limits on future American involvement in Europe. To place this in a more favorable context, one should recognize that as yet the U.S. population had little reason to see their nation as a

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major player on the world scene. American involvement in the European war had initially been financial rather than military and later involvement had been most significant for its psychological impact on the opposing powers. Military involvement in Russia in 1918-1919 also failed to heap any great glory on the American armies, and it is understandable that many Americans would have seen further involvement in Europe as ignominious, distasteful, and not necessarily guaranteed of success. Thus, though there are stories where the defeat of the American armed forces is envisioned—such as Louis Buswell's "Clouds of Death" (1929), in which the U.S. defends itself from an all-world invasion, and Murray Leinster's "Politics" (1932), where the U.S. Navy ignores defeatist/pacifist sentiments of the U.S. populace and politicians to fight invading world navies—we should be slow to ascribe it to paranoia but understand that this was a very real fear at the time. That America should fear attack is also more plausible than it may seem. Both of the above stories, and Raymond Emery Lawrence's "The Posterity Fund," an account of the fall of America, express as much fear as suspicion of European and Asian intentions—a war on two fronts is a legitimate nightmare after the World War I experience—and this fear is based in a sound understanding of America's economic role in international relations in the interwar period. Perhaps the major problem in European relations in the 1920s had been the issue of reparations. Had the U.S. not, legitimately of course, insisted on full repayment of war debts from Allied nations, the issue might not have been so vital, but while willing to renegotiate the reparation agreements when Germany failed to meet payments, the American government was not willing to tie this to the obligations of her own debtors. The stories by Buswell, Lawrence, and Leinster allude to this or, in the case of Buswell's "Clouds of Death," refer directly to this issue as a source of future contention and united action on the part of Europe. Referring to the aftermath of a second (futuristic) European war, Buswell wrote, "America, for once, showed good judgement and stayed in her own back yard. The belligerents impoverished themselves; America profited, so that at the close of the war she had control of the world's finances. Debtors generally hate their creditors. As the world's creditor, America was no exception" (272). This quotation reflects general public antagonism to war profiteers after World War I. Though sf writers recognized the debt issue, they did not publicly acknowledge the extent to which American protectionism was to reinforce this crisis. It denied industrial Europe the chance to compensate for markets lost to the U.S. during the war to repay debt through trade. I suggest that the absence of comment in this area testifies to the consensus which existed in American society on this issue. Only the most radical groups in the 1930s were willing to further endanger American jobs by the apparent threat of free trade. If sf writers saw a threat in current international conditions, what did they offer in response, and to what extent did this parallel and thus illuminate middleAmerican opinion? Even for those who were hostile to the peace movements of the 1930s, it had become clear that issues of social and economic justice were


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inextricably linked to America's ability to stay out of European entanglements, while even the most left-leaning members of the peace movement were capable of ignoring calls for "self-determination" to fulfill other "just" demands. In common with what we know of "popular" political opinion the response to the threat of international war was complex and at times confused. Among political activists it was not uncommon to find isolationists from the right linked with internationalist, pro-League of Nations pacifists in an attempt to exclude America from further European warfare. The Ludlow amendment, the campaign which maintained considerable momentum in Congress from 1935 to 1941, was one such attempt. This would have required the government to hold a national referendum in order to declare war on any power that had not attacked the United States. Although polling is notoriously unreliable, there seems to have been considerable support for this proposal, for multilateral disarmament, and to an extent for unilateral disarmament.5 It is this context which forms the backdrop and in fact the raison d'etre behind Leinster's "Politics," a proarmament reaction to the peace politics of all American elections since the war. Leinster's enemy is unspecified. On the eve of an election, the navy is ordered to avoid confrontation with the enemy to appease a pacifist electorate. When the enemy takes the Pacific, "Throughout a panic-stricken nation, strong pacifist political pressure was . . . brought to bear to force the Congress to accept . . . [the enemy's] terms" (272)—terms which greatly resemble the disarmament demands of Versailles. Inevitably the navy saves the day and "pacifism is no longer respectable" (278). The questionable plausibility of the story's context is affirmed if it is borne in mind that by 1937 the major antiwar organizations had established an Emergency Peace Campaign precisely to influence decision making with regard to U.S. involvement in Spain and with the intention of mobilizing antiwar feeling in future elections. This campaign and the later Keep America Out of the War Congress (1938) succeeded in marshalling both isolationist as well as pacifist feeling, although this alliance was to collapse from both sides as the war in Europe progressed. As the United States moved closer to war, the atmosphere in the late 1930s was such that radio stations broadcasting either proor antiinterventionist material were liable to receive a deluge of complaints. Even the Red Cross was criticized, as its effort to recruit medical personnel for the armed services was seen as a means to foster war propaganda.6 The fear of war, and of the danger which the very preparation for war could create, was amply reflected in the pages of the science fiction magazines and not all science fiction writers objected to the antiwar campaigns of the 1930s. For some, the arguments of the peace campaigners made a certain kind of sense. The devastation of World War I, in particular the long-term problems created by a war of attrition, made certain approaches to international warfare attractive. As H. Bruce Franklin has indicated, the superweapon has remained a constant in American prophetic and speculative fiction since the late nineteenth century, and in the 1930s it appeared to offer a convenient solution for both the promilitarist and the propacifist.7 Buswell's "Clouds of Death" is perhaps a typical example of such confidence. The superweapon here is a motorized light aircraft cum hang-glider, a

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common early science fiction image and interestingly not designed as a weapon at all but as a means to facilitate mass transportation and communication. Perhaps its greatest significance is that it is depicted as a weapon of mass democracy, employed as a guerrilla weapon against an occupying power. For all the author's dismissal of popular opinion within the text, it is the popular opinion of the American people, willing to use it in their own defense, which this particular superweapon is designed to harness, two contradictory beliefs common to interwar populism. The overall argument, and one which many peace makers from both the proand antiarmaments side have posited, is that negotiation is only possible from a position of strength. Of course, the definition of such a position is open to discussion and even the earliest of science fiction writers were not afraid to play games with such ideas. If the superweapon theory is to work, it is not actually necessary to understand the nature of the weapon, only that its deterrence value be sufficiently great. A. L. Hodges in "An Astounding Announcement" (1935) took the superweapon theorists at their word, and in the face of a threat of total destruction his world government opts for eternal peace and the burial (literally) of the superweapon secrets. Only at the denouement do we discover that the superweapon is, in reality, a bluff perpetrated by a scientist in search of peace. Despite the technophilia of the 1930s and the confidence of human beings' ability to master the technocratic management of international politics, some science fiction writers did have the sense to question such self-confidence. Perhaps my favorite short story on "peace" is Lieutenant John Pease's "The Invisible Bomber," a story which reinforces my personal confidence in the good sense of the military in the face of politicians on both sides of the peace and armaments debate. For in Pease's story the new superweapon is treated with all the suspicion which H. Bruce Franklin could have desired. It, its inventor and any notes pertaining to the invention are disposed of as quickly as possible, thus ensuring that, whilst peace may not be enforced by greater threat, neither will the practice of war be escalated. The above stories each do their part in creating an overall—if as yet incomplete—picture of the extent to which a political idea had been absorbed into the public domain. Science fiction's ability to accommodate the global provides evidence of interest in issues which are too large to be encompassed within much mainstream fiction or which would reduce such fiction to rhetoric. This ability is reinforced by the very limits to political speculation which have been observed by critics of the genre, particularly feminists. Science fiction, with rare exceptions, is only able to speculate within the expectations of its own historical context and is most likely to speculate on those areas which are at the forefront of this context. A historical contexrualization of science fiction, therefore, while providing source material for the cultural historian, can also help both to explain the limitations of fictive speculation and illuminate the areas of its success. If science fiction is to have a respected place in the canons of the academy— which presumably is a goal shared by all of its supporters—then the genre must be considered as more than a collection of texts aspiring to be recognized for their literary excellence. Today, with science fiction forced to compete within literary


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criticism on the basis of a value system designed for a very different form of writing, it is imperative that, in at least one area of academic discourse, science fiction should be taken on its own merits and values and examined in its own historical and social context. I contend that historians, not literary critics, are best situated, and most qualified, to make these contributions.

Notes 1. Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn, "Science Fiction Courses in Higher Education in Great Britain: A Preliminary Guide," Foundation: The Review of Science Fiction, No. 59 (Autumn 1993), 59-69. 2. As shown in Alfred I. Berger, The Magic That Works: John W. Campbell and the American Response to Technology (San Bernardino, California: Borgo Press, 1993). 3. For data about science fiction readers, see William Sims Bainbridge, Dimensions of Science Fiction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), and Linda Fleming, "The American SF Subculture," Science-Fiction Studies, 4 (1977), 291-305. 4. The 1938 Ludlow amendment would have required the government to hold a referendum before a declaration of war. 5. Many saw the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, binding nations to renounce war as an instrument of national policy except in case of defense, as a sign that disarmament was a real possibility. 6. Justus Doenecke, "Non-Intervention ism of the Left: The Keep America out of the War Congress, 1938-1941," Journal of Contemporary History, 12:2 (April 1977), 227. 7. H. Bruce Franklin, War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).


Chapter 12

(E)raced Visions: Women of Color and Science Fiction in the United States Elyce Rae Helford

As feminist science fiction writers and critics work for increased recognition and authority within the traditional (white, male) science fiction canon, the few women of color in the genre wage their own (explicit and implicit) battles with publishers, editors, and the themes and traditions of white writers. Such writers' sciencefictional considerations of issues as gender, race, and class help us understand why the politics and style of women writers of color may differ from those of white writers. And by examining their experiences with the publishing industry, we see how and by whom our knowledge of the experiences of people of color in the United States, as represented within literature, is controlled. There are two primary ways that publishers can "erace"1 the literary visions of women of color in a white- and male-dominated culture. First, they can refuse to publish their writing, judging it inferior to writing by white (women) writers based upon internalized racist standards of "universality" of appeal or deviance from ethnocentric principles of "excellence" in writing. Second, they can publish only a small, select group of writers of color, distorting and controlling images of "minority" experiences. Carefully selected tokens allow publishers to decide which views of ethnic America reach audiences and which do not. So, the lives of women of color are scrutinized, distilled, whitewashed, and offered to a scrutinized, distilled, whitewashed American public.2 Nowhere in American publishing is this more true than science fiction, where only with the women's movement of the 1970s did even white feminist voices break through the erasure of past tokenism. Only then could feminists' visions ascend the patriarchal tower of representations of technology, outer space, and aliens. Even then, women were (and are often still) the "space" (or in psychoanalytic terms the "lack") upon which phallocentric male science fiction writers erected their fiction; women were and are the aliens.3 As Ursula K. Le Guin put it, "For decades it was a man's world. The only visible women in it were a few daughters of mad scientists . . . and brass-bra'd Amazons. . . . It had been infiltrated secretly by a few heroic women writers with tight-lipped names—C. L. Moore, Leigh Brackett, Andre

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Norton—but all the other writers, editors, and most of the readers over age 14, were male. It was the planet of the Good Old Boys. And then—THEY came. The Aliens invaded." Le Guin then applauds the "deeply radical minds"4 of the best feminist science fiction writers from Alice Sheldon and Anne McCaffrey to Octavia E. Butler and Carol Emshwiller. Yet, though she rightly claims a writer of color such as Butler as a "sister," I have learned, as a white Jewish feminist, that there are limits to the possibilities of sisterhood when feminism is defined without acknowledging racial and ethnic difference.5 Butler remains one of the few African-American feminists to write solely in the genres of science fiction and fantasy, yet my study need not be limited to her work. If we reject, as Marleen Barr urges, the label "science fiction" in favor of "feminist fabulation" for writing which uses fantastic images and metaphors to address feminist issues, we see the links rather than insisting upon the differences between science fiction writers and mainstream feminist writers. Barr defines "feminist fabulation" as a self-conscious fiction which serves to "unmask the fictionality of patriarchal master narratives, rewrite patriarchal tales, and be feminist metafiction— fiction about patriarchal fiction."6 Further, the broader boundaries of this new category help feminist critics reveal historical connections between modern feminists who embrace aspects of the fantastic in their fiction, postmodernists who continue this tradition outside of science fiction, and alleged or self-identified feminist science fiction writers. Barr, like Le Guin, rightly includes Butler in her definition and description of the feminist work she studies; but there are key distinctions to be made along race lines. Though Barr is right to want to tear down the "ghetto walls" (105) which have resulted in the obscurity of important feminist writers for their work with science fiction, such walls may be torn down at the expense of attending to significant differences within feminism(s). Like the white-dominated women's movement, which has not adequately attended to the complexities of race and class as they affect diverse women, the white-dominated field of feminist science fiction has not adequately attended to race and class in depicting women. If we accept Barr's terminology, white feminist writers (especially those who do not address issues of race, but even some who do) offer a feminist fabulation which critiques patriarchal myths, but women of color writing in the genre may offer a critique of white, middle-class feminism as well as white patriarchy; they emerge as writers of what I term "womanist fabulation," to borrow from Alice Walker.7 The label "womanist fabulation," like "feminist fabulation," allows us to see connections between writers who have been ignored by feminist literary criticism. For example, Barr notes Barbara Christian's exclusion of Butler in her work on placing African-American women's writing in the American literary tradition (101). Thus, though a study of science fiction by women of color might become a study of Butler, a study of "womanist fabulation" could discuss writers like Toni Morrison, Jewelle Gomez, Louise Erdrich, Maxine Hong Kingston, and other feminists of color. If upholding science fiction as a category is significant, it is to continue to attend

Helford: Women of Color and Science Fiction

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the dismissal of much of this genre in academic circles and the American literary canon (even when broadened by token writers). If it is important to address what Le Guin calls the "feminization" of this historically masculine field by "the men who control literary criticism in the journals and in academe,"81 will embrace womanist fabulation while attending to the insistence (by publishers, primarily, but critics too) on the maintenance of the category of science fiction, as it continues to exclude or tokenize women writers of color. With such goals, I will focus on the literary strategies and experiences with the publishing industry of Butler as well as Misha (working name of Misha Nogha), a less well-known writer of color whose experiences and writing illustrate both the difficulties of getting published for feminist science fiction writers of color and, through her textual affinities with Butler, some of the images and themes central to my conception of womanist fabulation. Butler's works contribute to the diversity of women's experience and illuminate the possibilities science fiction offers to examine gender and race relations. Through literal and metaphoric representations of past, present, and future enslavement Butler explores the connections between—indeed, the inseparability of—sexism, racism, and classism for black women in America. Through her experiences with publishers involving cover art, we can examine the loss of authority she has faced. Racist and sexist cover art often enshrouds her black feminist writing. When I interviewed Butler at a fan convention in 1993, she told the story of the "green face," the cover for the Avon paperback edition of her second novel, Mind of My Mind (1977). When the artist offered a representative portrait of Mary, the novel's young black female protagonist, Avon vetoed it. The cover was then "eraced," replaced by the face of a white woman; this time, Butler vetoed it. The compromise was—as typical for a genre which often examines gender and race only through safe stereotypes of alien metaphors—a green face. Mary now looked like one of the XMen's female mutants, complete with the Marvel comics-standard of white feminine beauty. Ten years later, racism and sexism were even more blatant on the cover of Dawn (Warner, 1987), first novel in her Xenogenesis trilogy. The protagonist Lilith is, like Mary, a young black woman, but on the cover she is white and highly sexualized, her silver spacesuit (one she never wears in the novel) unzipped to expose ample cleavage. This anti-Lilith is seen opening one of the alien "pods" that house sleeping survivors of a nuclear holocaust, revealing another young white female. While more accurate in terms of racial identity (Lilith awakens several white women in the novel) the figure is more highly sexualized and representative of American standards of beauty than any seen in the novel. To their credit, when the Science Fiction Book Club republished the Xenogenesis trilogy, they chose Pat Morrissey, a white feminist fantasy artist, to paint the cover. Morrissey read the novels and strove to represent Butler's vision with care and respect. Similarly, Beacon Press's Black Women Writers series gave Butler's Kindred a. beautiful stylized portrait of the novel's black female protagonist, later replaced by a photograph of a black woman; and Warner Books, which so butchered Dawn,

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ironically did better with her earlier novel, Wild Seed (1980) and the other Xenogenesis novels, Adulthood Rites (1988) and Imago (1990). Potential within the industry? Butler still went to small presses, Four Walls Eight Windows and Seven Stories, to publish first editions of her next novels Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998); perhaps her MacArthur "genius" grant has liberated her from the maddening habits of mass-market publishers. Though racist and sexist manipulation of an author's work (in terms of text or through misrepresentative cover art) is clearly an act of "eracure," refusing to publish works by women of color is even more egregious. Metis (or mixed-blood) writer Misha's cyberpunk novel Red Spider White Web (published by Morrigan, a small British press) received high critical praise from Brian W. Aldiss, Le Guin, Bruce Sterling, James Blaylock, and other science fiction writers and critics. While Morrigan must be lauded for its decision to publish Red Spider White Web, the fact that, despite positive reviews, no American publisher has expressed interest says much about the state of the art. Publishers decline to print Red Spider White Web in America, claims Misha, because the book is too difficult for mainstream readers. Such criticism may be a response to the surrealist and poetic prose which opens the book. The first chapter, "Daruma," introduces us to the character Tommy Uchida: "His circuit is a skull juggler. He's a factory guard who stalks the silent chemical night. Eye guard translucent aquariums of red agar. This. This is rehabreahrehab ilit tation."9 While such prose is daunting, it effectively places readers inside the mind of the flawed cyborg creation that is Tommy; to experience the world as he does. Unlike conventional literary strategies which allow some distance between character and reader through authorial intrusion, Misha forces readers into her world and explains it only in so far as her characters are able.10 Such an experience could alienate readers expecting more traditional science fiction prose. If I cannot control the decisions of publishers, I can address the importance of writers like Misha to science fiction scholars. Publishing more women of color and inviting more women of color into academia would be the best way to address the eracure of the visions of feminist writers of color (in science fiction and out); however, white feminist critics must also take responsibility (through studying race and its erasure) for the white-dominated system which, to an extent, privileges our voices and our visions. To see the connections between gender, race, and class in the fiction of feminist writers of color like Butler and Misha, we must examine their focus on survival, specifically the struggle for survival of women of color. Unlike Russ or Sheldon, Butler and Misha offer no separatist Utopias nor feminist warriors who rival men in physical strength; unlike Le Guin, they depict no female presidents or galactic rulers. These authors' female characters are always compromised within a culture that alienates them doubly, on the basis of gender and race, and are constantly thrown into impossible situations and forced to survive. Their "victories" are often solely their own survival or, for Butler, the continued existence of their people and ways of thinking into the future. Butler's protagonists are symbolically important to women of color for their


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ability to endure and resist the sexist and racist oppression they and their ancestors have faced. Though unwilling to depict worlds where her female characters of color escape the struggles of their predecessors, Butler does invite her readers to understand their survival up close. And the figure she most often focuses on to develop the significance of these struggles is the mother. Though most feminists would agree that motherhood is undervalued throughout the world, the complexity of the battle for abortion rights and women's desire for economic power has problematized the championing of motherhood for many women. For Butler, however, the issue is mediated by African-American history, including the abuses of the slave system and forced sterilization and economically necessitated abortion in the twentieth.11 Even when they must bear the children of rape or incest, Butler's protagonists are unyielding: abortion is never an option. This may be difficult reading for a pro-choice audience; it is painful to see an enslaved woman (whether literally, in the antebellum South, or figuratively, in some alternate or alien world) give birth to the master's child. However, we must examine such fiction in the context not only of gender, but of race and class as well. A pro-choice attitude is often a pro-abortion attitude for mainstream feminists. This position may be alien or even offensive to women of color (especially of lower classes) who historically consider abortion an unsatisfactory solution to economic oppression which necessitates limits to family numbers. Angela Davis has also shown how the issue of abortion rights in the U.S. is entwined with the horrors of forced sterilization for women of color. With these factors informing our understanding of historical race and class divisions among women, motivations and character-development strategies for feminist science fiction writers of color like Butler are clear: oppression must not destroy the individual or the race; and the individual, in much of Butler's fiction, is the race. For Dana, the modern protagonist of the 1979 novel Kindred, condoning the rape of her great-great grandmother by a white slave master is the only way to continue her family and ensure her own survival. For Anyanwu, the immortal shapeshifter of Wild Seed, her children are her primary reason for living. They are her weakness, since she can be blackmailed to ensure their safety, but also her strength, since they keep her morally grounded when immortality might make her callous. Her maternal nature also allows her to compromise with the vampiric Doro. Though she cannot escape or kill him, she can eventually make him love and need her enough to stop murdering her children. Again, the goal of Butler's protagonists is survival. Though we may want Dana to murder the master to stop the rape of her ancestor or hope Anyanwu will kill her torturer, Butler's resolutions are rooted in the experience of an oppressed people, the need to compromise in order to survive. In a sexist, racist culture, the continued struggles of people of color may be the best and only inspiration for their progeny. But science fiction is about the future, new options and new ways of thinking, we might argue; and Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy does offer a vision of the future. After nuclear war, aliens called Oankali travel to Earth and, assuming its inhabitants are bent on suicide, debate proper contact protocol. As a species which evolves

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based on gene-trading with other beings, they decide to contact and interbreed with humans—not only to keep their own race alive, but also to help humans weed out the hierarchical element of their biology which the Oankali claim is what (combined with intelligence) causes the human tendency to destructiveness and violence. In Dawn, the aliens offer this commentary on the human condition: "You are also hierarchical. . . . When human intelligence served it instead of guiding it, when human intelligence did not even acknowledge it as a problem, but took pride in it or did not notice it at all . . . [it] was like ignoring cancer."12 To defend her diagnosis of human ills, Butler moves from biology to sociology. In an interview with Larry McCaffery, she asserts: I tell people Ronald Reagan inspired Xenogenesis—and that it was the only thing he inspired in me that I actually approve of. When his first term was beginning, his people were talking about a "winnable" nuclear war . . . the idea that more and more nuclear "weapons" would make us safer. That's when I began to think about human beings having the two conflicting characteristics of intelligence and a tendency toward hierarchical behavior—and that hierarchical behavior is too much in charge, too self-sustaining.13 In their lifestyle and worldview, the gene-trading Oankali offer a refutation of the kind of capitalistic individualism and violence Butler here laments. However, these aliens also insist that only their intervention can save the human race. Though the relationship between Oankali and human is more complex than that between master and slave—Butler labels it a form of "symbiosis" (56)—interbreeding is mandatory and inescapable for human survivors. The individual chosen to lead the human survivors and render them amenable to the Oankali's plans for a new species mix is Lilith, a widowed African-American woman who is loathe to take the position. She does, however, and eventually not only comes to love and depend on the Oankali, but, later in the trilogy, also to bear the mixed-breed children who are the unavoidable future of the human race. Butler does not permit Lilith to resist or escape her captors; instead, she forces her to adapt to her surroundings and survive. The message is not radical, but realistic; Butler's female characters are always realists. Envisioning idyllic futures or alternate universes, Butler suggests, will not help women of color (or humanity as a whole) survive and evolve. Categorically overthrowing one's oppressors is a rare option; understanding how the system works and how to win small battles for survival is the primary goal. Only through struggle and painful compromise can the world change—slowly but surely. And the enemy cannot be avoided by separatism, by Butler's credo; confrontation and ongoing contact are the only options she offers her characters and readers. Though one might call Butler's fiction "conservative" in the category of feminist science fiction, in light of her disturbing emphasis on biological determinism, this label is insensitive to the complexities of race and class issues as they inform feminist politics, past or present. From such fiction, we conclude that only a privileged minority can take individual and group survival for granted, as a basis from which to write science fiction or to live. Without women, humanity


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cannot survive; but reproductive functions usually do not guarantee women freedom, respect, or equality in a patriarchal world. For women of color, reproductive capacity has not even guaranteed life. Like Butler, Misha reveals the precariousness of life for women and people of color in a white- and male-supremacist system, with an emphasis on the evils of capitalism as it literally and metaphorically enslaves all Americans. Hers is a Native American feminism, borne of a life lived within and in resistance to mainstream existence. Her graphic descriptions of violence may be difficult reading for audiences seeking escape from such depictions in feminist science fiction. For minority women, though, whose people have faced the abuses of slavery, mass slaughter, forced resettlement, and broken treaties, avoiding violence is just another way to erase the suffering of people of color. Butler and Misha differ, however, in their strategies for representing violence. Butler, in a form more conventional (and more acceptable to mainstream publishers) than Misha's, places her characters between the violence and the reader. For example, when Dana witnesses the severe beating of an enslaved man, she reveals her unpreparedness for such a spectacle, citing the unreal nature of television and film representations of slave torture: I could literally smell his sweat, hear every ragged breath, every cry, every cut of the whip. I could see his body jerking, convulsing, straining against the rope as his screaming went on and on. My stomach heaved, and I had to force myself to stay where I was and keep quiet . . . . I had seen people beaten on television and in the movies. I had seen the too-red blood substitute streaked across their backs and heard their well-rehearsed screams. But I hadn't lain nearby and smelled their sweat or heard them pleading and praying, shamed before their families and themselves. I was probably less prepared for the reality than the child crying not far from me.14 With the critical distance of Dana's perspective, we do not suffer the pain of the man being beaten, at least not for long. Dana mediates our relationship to this violence, helping us understand how unprepared we would be to witness or, worse, experience such a beating; but by intellectualizing the experience immediately after witnessing it, Dana helps us escape from it emotionally. Misha is less generous to her readers, though few readers would call Butler's depictions of violence generous. In Red Spider White Web we witness an attempted rape (by a roving gang of rich boys, connected to white supremacy by one member's swastika mask), the tattooing of a character's entire back while she is bound and helpless, and multiple murders. Like Butler, Misha does temper her depictions. When the rape of Kumo is attempted, Misha opts not to depict the scene in detail; this can be read as an effort to avoid the titillation of misogynistic readers. The novel's murders are also described in poetic language which obscures the violence of the images. In contrast to the omitted description of the rape, these "beautiful" renderings of murder can be read as critiques of glorifications of violence in modern media. In the one-paragraph chapter "Steel Cathedral," we witness and enact, through Misha's use of multiple perspective (the murderer is

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alternately referred to as "you" and "I"), the violent murder of the character Dori, who creates kinetic sculptures out of sharpened pieces of steel: "She walks with a bracelet of steel teeth" (98). Though most characters in the novel die by the murderer's abuse of their art—Dori by her sculptures, the ballerina Swanie strangled with her dance tights ("I free her from encumbrance of flesh, I am wrapping her white neck with the throat of the dying swan" [15]), only through art are her surviving characters saved. For Misha, art is a revolutionary act and experience, especially in the hands of Kumo, a woman as alien to the white patriarchal society which created her as the system is to her. She is an experiment of corporate-controlled genetic engineering, a Cree Indian whose genes were spliced with those of a wolverine, a racially othered feminist who is not afraid to kill to survive. She ekes out her existence in the ruins of an industrial complex while trying to create hologrammatic art: something politically powerful and lasting in morally and spiritually devoid surroundings. "My life, cleaned like a revolver, levels in the direction of happiness" (85), she asserts, articulating the necessity of violence for survival, even as one works towards the possibility of a better future. The other female artist is Dori, described as being "from that Three Sisters tribe that pinched the breath out of male children as they were born. Eliminating men. Men who caused women grief. All pretty maids in a row were executed" (26). This background gives Dori a toughness needed for survival in this world, even as it prefigures her inevitable destruction. Like Butler, Misha rejects feminist separatism as an effective strategy in a male-dominated culture. As the novel opens, Dori has sold out to work for the government; this means escape to a dying city and then to Mickey-san, the domed paradise where the rich live in a technotopic heaven of mechanical servants and virtual-reality helmets. Selling out, however, does not save Dori from being brutally murdered. The only "community" of women in the novel are the "fashalts," sex slaves who are another product of genetic engineering. They accept and, it seems to Kumo, even like their oppression—which is exactly what they were designed to do. They have no legal rights and, despite Kumo's attempt to instill a bit of radical ferninism into the "brains" of those she meets, they do not challenge their roles. When we witness a police officer brutally kill one of these disposable women, we see the impossibility of survival for women in the extremely misogynistic culture which Misha envisions. Though Kumo's genetic differences allow her to survive, they are treated as racial Otherness by those around her. When she tells her not-quite friend, the artist Motler, that she wants to do her next hologrammatic art on the "genetics" (the people—apparently all Native Americans—chosen by the government for experiments), he rejects the idea because "I don't trust packs of intelligent animals" (30). When Kumo tells him to watch what he is saying, he responds like bigots who excuse racism by removing the favored (or tolerated) individual from the context of their subgroup: "You're not one of them tribes. . . . You're shadow-shit is all" (30). Since Kumo ran away from the "farms" where genetically-altered people live, seeking the freedom of the exindustrial zone despite its violence and wretchedness,


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she is invisible to the mainstream world, representing the impoverished homeless of urban America. Unlike Butler's protagonists, Kumo must struggle alone without the safety of community. She cannot trust the other artists with whom she interacts; any one of them could be the murderer, any one of them could rob her and sell her out for money or supplies. By comparison, Butler's protagonists always surround themselves with some community. Kindred's Dana finds comfort with her enslaved ancestors in the past and Parable of the Sower's Lauren molds a group of strangers and superficial acquaintances into a trusting "family" as they attempt to escape the violence of an increasingly impoverished near-future Los Angeles. Even in such bleak surroundings as projected in Parable of the Sower, the skeptical and brutally realistic 18-year-old Lauren can still consider the possibility of getting married and someday bearing children. Ironically, the aspects of Kumo's behavior that alienate her from others are the characteristics that allow her to survive. The one-half of one percent of America's population today which is Native American had to be genetically strong to withstand the diseases which killed off millions of them. Kumo inherited this biological legacy, keeping her alive among lethal new viruses—"fifteen minute bugs" (30). Motler marvels, "Lucky you come from Native stock or you'd be a tapeworm's arse by now" (31). Kumo also represents the survivalism of Native people in her role as trickster; her name is "spider" in Japanese, which can be linked to the spider of Caribbean Ananse or trickster stories. When she sets up her artistic wares at "Market," her only opportunity to sell artwork to or even contact the general populace, she "would heckle the GAP [the Japanese artists] until they were mad enough to throw something at her to scare her off. Many of these craft artists, liking custom, just threw something as soon as she announced herself. . . . sometimes they threw a piece of ware she could sell later, or even a bite of edible food" (41). This trickster role is central to understanding Kumo and her ability to survive. White feminist critics might prefer a protagonist with more desire to attain power to control the conditions under which she and others live, but Kumo never attempts to escape her surroundings or destroy those who biologically and economically enslaved her. (This task is given to male cyborg Tommy Uchida, biologically manipulated by the government to create Mickey-san, who eventually blows up the domed city, acting as a wrathful god destroying his Gomorrah.) We can, however, read Kumo through a Native American feminism which acknowledges the futility of attempting to attain power in a culture which is morally corrupt, a government which reneged on every treaty it ever signed. And Kumo's sterility can be read as active resistance to bringing more children into an increasingly hostile white- and male-dominated world (especially to Native Americans, but even to white male children as well). While Butler shows that equality and peace can only be achieved by surviving injustices and abuses, necessitating giving birth even to the master's child, Misha is more pessimistic, proclaiming the downfall of white, Western imperialism at the potential cost of all

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life on Earth. In "Reptilian Dreams," she describes the violent end to our world, as agents of nature perform a ritual that proclaims a link between western technology and the destruction of our world and ourselves: This is the twisted night that scarecrows leap off their stands and lope through the corn like loose jointed pumas. The garnet bullet of the August sun has penetrated the heart of their enemy and killed them. They leer at teen-agers stranded by their hot cars, out of gas, blood thick as old ketchup, tears of self-pity dried in salt streaks along their cruel cheeks. The scarecrows slice them open with sharpened sticks of sage, push their red pulp onto the asphalt, and smear the skins along the shoulder with old tire treads and roadkill skunks.15 In Butler's novels, there is always a future—no matter how unappealing—to which the female protagonists are drawn. In Red Spider White Web, there is no future at all for any but the most economically (and racially) privileged. The only options Kumo has are survival or death. While Butler's mother figures resist and subvert the system by continuing their race (in whatever form) into the future they are offered, Kumo resists and subverts the system in which she must live just by staying alive despite the odds. Kumo cannot become a mother; Misha implies she is sterile, linking her to the fate of America's dwindling Native population. In this aspect, Butler's African-American characters seem to have an ironic privilege: blacks do have a surviving community (despite ongoing attempts by a whitesupremacist government and culture to devastate them), but Native Americans are literally being erased as a people. Still, Misha's novel ends with a message about the survival of women of color similar to that in Butler's novels. Compromise and a future are forced upon Kumo, as they are upon Butler's Dana, Anyanwu, Lilith, and Lauren. Japanese corporations, which earlier contributed to and sustained the American economy, have pulled out and are heading for new planets, ensuring the downfall of the U.S. and, it seems, the Earth. As Mickey-san explodes at the hands of Tommy Uchida, Kumo is approached by Nakamura, a member of the neo-yakuza (the Japanese Mafia), who reveals that the Japanese people (rich and corporate-connected only) have left the planet after destroying the American economy. When Kumo asks why, Nakamura says that the destruction is retaliation for the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Kumo, as trickster, is overjoyed: "Yes, that's good. .. . That's very good. I admire the Japanese. I've always admired them. No one would have been expecting it. In America, profit is everything. They would never suspect honor. Money, greed, even revenge, but never honor" (212). Nakamura's declaration and Kumo's response unfortunately reduce all of Japanese post-World War II interaction with the U.S. to a single-minded strategy for regaining "honor," albeit a strategy over which only the corporate power elite had control. This has the potential to validate anti-Japanese paranoia in this country, despite Misha's belief (asserted through Kumo) that the Japanese would be justified to retaliate for the bombings which, Misha claims, there can be no excuse for. If her racial politics are problematic in her response to the Japanese, the


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exploitation of Kumo nevertheless reveals a sexism and classism (with racial overtones) which is not. As Nakamura shows an understanding of the role of art with which Kumo sympathizes—"art is the water of life, that stuff we breathe and breed in" (212)—he also shows an understanding of human relations and the politics of power: "Yes, I collect. . . art. But also, I collect something even more important. . . . I collect the artists" (212). He will take Kumo away from the dying Earth to the colonies the wealthy Japanese have been building. Though she will no longer be attacked by rapists, mocked for her racial difference, or left to starve, her gender, race, and class still mean that she will live in a world controlled by others. The freedom she experienced as "shadow-shit" is gone, though she may survive longer. As Butler's black female protagonists learn, even when there is a future, there is no life for the minoritized without extreme compromise. And Kumo learns this, as Misha closes her novel with the haunting words, "At last, she understood" (212). We can only assume that she will fare as well as Butler's survivors with this new knowledge, or as well as Misha herself, as she continues to search (without compromise) for a publisher who is willing to unleash Kumo on mainstream America.

Notes 1. Erace refers to the refusal of race as a significant factor in a writer's work. Race is always present, but as "whiteness" is rarely discussed self-consciously in writing from whitedominated cultures, such work is not "eraced" but "deraced." 2. Joanna Russ's How to Suppress Women's Writing (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983) relates the exclusion of writers of color to the exclusion of women writers: "we don't find the absolute prohibition on the writing of women qua women that has (for example) buried so much of the poetic and rhetorical tradition of black slave America, although many of the same devices are used to trivialize the latter when it does get written down" (6). 3. Woman-as-alien has long been central to feminist science fiction criticism; see Marleen Barr, Alien to Femininity: Speculative Fiction and Feminist Theory (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987); Robin Roberts, A New Species: Gender and Science in Science Fiction (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1993); and Jenny Wolmark, Aliens and Others: Science Fiction, Feminism and Postmodernism (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1994). 4. Ursula K. Le Guin, "Books: The World of Science Fiction," Ms. (November/December 1990), 52. 5. See also Helford, "Going 'Native': Ursula Le Guin, Misha, and the Politics of Speculative Literature," Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction, No. 71 (Autumn 1997), 77-86. 6. Barr, Lost in Space: Probing Science Fiction and Beyond (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 105. Later page references in the text are to this edition. 7. Walker's In Search of Our Mother's Gardens: Womanist Prose (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983) introduced the term "womanist," primarily to distinguish white feminism from feminism by African-American women or other women of color (xi-xii). 8. Le Guin, 53. 9. Misha, Red Spider White Web (London: Morrigan Press, 1990), 9; later page references in the text are to this edition.

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10. When I taught the novel to undergraduates, they expressed no major difficulties, though we discussed the novel's more surreal passages and translated (largely by context) the use of Japanese. 11. See Angela Davis, "Racism, Birth Control and Reproduction Rights," in Women, Race and Class (New York: Random House, 1981), 202-21. 12. Butler, Dawn (New York: Warner Books, 1987), 37. Later page references in the text are to this edition. 13. Butler, interview with Larry McCaffery, Across the Wounded Galaxies (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 67. 14. Butler, Kindred (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979), 36. 15. Misha, "Reptilian Dreams," in Ke-Qua-Hawk-As (La Grande: Wordcraft of Oregon, 1994), 15.

Chapter 13

Hard Magic, Soft Science: The Marginalization of Kevin J. Anderson and Doug Beason's Assemblers of Infinity and Bruce Boston's Stained Glass Rain Howard V. Hendrix In Fiction and the Social Contract, Larry Langford argues that "History is to culture as fiction is to nature": since all fiction is ultimately lies, it is writing without a social contract—one fiction is, at a certain abstract level, just as good as another, so what must prevail among fictions, according to Langford, is a Hobbesian "war of all against all."] This paradigm immediately calls up objections: are history and historiography as monolithically socially contracted and free of internecine conflicts as this model suggests? Even among fictions, does the supposed war of all against all take place on a level battlefield? Langford's response to such objections2 involves distinguishing between history and historiography and pointing out that history as a mode of discourse takes precedence over literature because history provides the bases for law, for our understanding of our own individual and communal identity, for decisions of life and death importance. In this light, "Did the Holocaust take place?" is more vitally important than "Does Doris Lessing write science fiction?" Langford concludes that all fictions are inherently less authoritative than history because, he contends, history is the production of a community—many minds able to determine the truth value of a statement or a "fact" or a piece of evidence—while literature is more generally the production of individual minds, less concerned with a deep "objectivity" or "verifiability" or "falsifiability." This situation raises a number of paradoxes. History, as a communal production, is perceived as being less artificial—more natural and "real"—than the individual production of literature. History may work much like culture in the Hobbesian sense, but it paradoxically can operate this way only because it is perceived as being more "natural" in the scientific sense—objective, outside the self, not so subject to the whims of individual human motives. Literature, on the other hand, may work more like nature in the Hobbesian sense because, also paradoxically, it is perceived as being more obviously cultural—artificial, a human production, more subject to individual whims. It is from such purposeful confusion of the "natural" and the

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"cultural" that history gains much of its authority, and literature loses some of its authority. Arguably, for preliterate, prehistoric, and prescientific societies, the communally produced explanatory fiction of "myth" performs all the functions that science, history, and literature perform for our society. The idea of explanatory fiction lingers still in science fiction, a fiction which "borrows" authority from the explanatory mode of science. Supposedly, the bedrock authority of science fiction is scientific explanation—or speculation based on scientifically plausible ideas. Science fiction writers striving to expand their readership beyond the science fiction niche, however, usually have to move away from sf as an explanatory form, a "literature of ideas," to follow one of two paths: "go literary" and write more character-based fiction, or "go mainstream" and write aggressively plotty, actiondriven fiction. Yet in this drive for greater respectability, even canonical status, beyond the realm of the sf community, these writers may marginalize themselves from the perspective of the sf community. Examples of sf writers who have "gone literary" might include Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Ursula K. Le Guin, and, to an extent, William Gibson. Examples of sf writers who have "gone mainstream" might include Dean Ing and James P. Hogan, who have moved into the technothriller form. "Going literary" is to my mind actually "going cultural," while "going mainstream" is actually "going marketplace" and therefore "going natural"—that is, if one concedes the possibility that the idealized free marketplace of Adam Smith or David Ricardo is essentially Hobbes's "war of all against all" in economic guise. The imprimatur of Hobbesian nature (the marketplace) is seen in "bestseller status" in the appropriate lists, while the imprimatur of the culture industry is seen in "critical acclaim" in the appropriate authoritative literary reviews. For the same (supposedly unquestionable) hierarchical reasons that culture takes precedence over nature, and history takes precedence over literature, so does the critically acclaimed work take precedence over the mere bestseller. To be sure, the bestseller is sometimes critically acclaimed and the critical success is sometimes a bestseller, but these cases are more the exceptions than the rule—despite everything publishers and blurb writers do to blur the distinction between "cultural success" and "natural success." It is also true that one era's bestseller may become the revered literary work of later eras—Dickens's works come to mind—but my concern is the marketing of and response to newly published texts. If going cultural has increasingly meant moving inward toward character delineation, while going natural has increasingly meant moving outward toward plot and external action, then it is not surprising that the fiction which has had greatest cultural success in our country has been that which most admits of the limits of fiction. Since fiction is the product of individual minds rather than large communal movements, that fiction is most authoritative (i.e., most like history) which focuses on what fiction "should" focus on—the delineation of the individual and his/her motives. That fiction more concerned with external or communal or large "historical" action is the most obviously lacking in authority, the most obviously

Hendrix: Hard Magic, Soft Science

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false—that is, the most like fiction. Science fiction poses special problems, not only because of its future ("antihistorical") or alternate historical orientation, but also because science fiction, though most of its works are products of individual minds, also has a welldeveloped tribal or subcultural or communal sense of itself3 and heavily borrows the authority found in the productions of the scientific community. To explicate these ideas, I will focus on two transitional or liminal works: Kevin J. Anderson and Doug Beason's Assemblers of Infinity4 and Bruce Boston's Stained Glass Rain.5 Anderson, Beason, and Boston all have strong and long-standing ties to the science fiction community—Anderson and Beason as science fiction novelists, and Boston as a science fiction poet and story writer. Both Anderson and Beason's Assemblers and Boston's Rain appeared in 1993 and, with both novels, the authors were trying to move beyond science fiction: toward technothriller in the case of Anderson and Beason, toward contemporary literary fiction in the case of Boston. Assemblers was published primarily as a mass market paperback by Bantam Spectra, while Rain was published in far fewer copies by a small but respected literary press, Ocean View Books. That communities and subcultures affect textual production and textual authority is clear from these texts. Assemblers of Infinity, written by a pair of physicists, is "about" a scientific subculture or community; Stained Glass Rain, written by a poet, is "about" a poetry subculture or community. Anderson and Beason in Assemblers and Boston in Rain have followed Hemingway's dictum—"write about what you know"—with the result that both texts are "inside stories" of the functioning of the scientific and the poetic subcultures, respectively. These books bring with them as well the political biases of the subcultures from which their authors came: Assemblers evinces the right wing ideology of the military (Beason is an Air Force lieutenant colonel) or a military-funded scientific community (like Lawrence Livermore Labs, where Anderson works); Rain evinces the leftish slant of a humanities-endowed artistic and literary community (like the Bay Area poetry scene, where Boston has long been a participant). Politics, like literary tastes, often has less to do with reasoned arguments and logical criteria than with lived experience—background, work environment, whose ox is getting gored, who's paying the bills, etc. It is interesting to note that Anderson and Beason are headed toward technothriller (their next sale was in fact a full-blown technothriller), while Boston is headed toward "serious literary fiction." Where these books are headed reveals a great deal about where they are coming from—and how authors shift out of the "literature of ideas" subcultural form known as science fiction. Because the individual talent cannot avoid being part of some tradition, the act of writing necessarily involves both real and idealized communities and is therefore inherently social and political. John W. Campbell, Jr. asserted that the essence of the science fiction story is that it explores the impact of technology on human beings and human social systems.6 If Campbell's oft-quoted theory is correct, then both Boston's and Anderson and Beason's novels are science fiction. Boston's Rain, however, deals in some depth with the impact of a chemical technology—

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LSD-25—on a group of young American poets and their social set in New York and California in 1965, while Assemblers deals with the impact of an alien nanotechnology on small subsets of the scientific community sometime early in the twenty-first century. Boston's Rain, despite its arguably "science fictional" character, is marketed as "contemporary literature with fantastic elements,"7 but Anderson and Beason's Assemblers, despite its arguably mainstream elements, is still marketed as science fiction. I will later address the ancient complaints—"Why are stories about soft science not considered science fiction?" or its more relevant variant, "Why are stories about machines considered science fiction, while stories about drugs are not considered science fiction?" But I must lay to rest the idea that this genredistinguishing is based on some traditional notion of realism. Clarke's oft-quoted "law"—that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"—is pertinent here. Anderson and Beason's alien nanotech is more "magical" (and less realistic) than LSD-25; the 1965 of Rain is more realistic than the early twenty-first century of Assemblers. Boston's young poets spend at least as much time experiencing and analyzing the effects of LSD on their subjective reality as Anderson and Beason's scientists spend experiencing and analyzing the objective reality of the alien nanocritters they confront. Rain is, too, importantly more "realistic" in the sense of being more "historic" as I use the term here. This has less to do with the fact of its milieu being a consensus reality point in the past—1965—than it has to do with the way that Rain more fully admits the limits of fiction. Since fiction is the product of individual minds rather than communal movements, fictions like Rain are more culturally authoritative (i.e., more like history) because they focus on what fiction "should" focus on: the delineation of the individual and his/her motives—"character." That Assemblers, on the other hand, is more fictional has less to do with its future setting than with its globe-girdling scope and emphasis on external action or plot. Daring to focus on communal or large "historical" action (and thereby denying—or at least admitting fewer—limits to fiction), it is considered more naive, more clearly lacking in historical authority, more obviously false, more like fiction. Assemblers is less culturally authoritative but, curiously, more "naturally" authoritative—expected to possess a greater chance of success in the marketplace wars of all against all, as evidenced in its publication in many copies and in mass-market format. My focus on Stained Glass Rain and Assemblers of Infinity has more to do with personal history than an overarching grand plan. At the 1993 World Science Fiction Convention in San Francisco, Anderson gave me a copy of Assemblers and Boston gave me an advance copy of Rain because they knew that I had been writing reviews for The New York Review of Science Fiction and thought I might be interested in reading and reviewing their books. When by phone I suggested to NYRSF editor Donald Keller that I'd like to review Assemblers and Stained Glass Rain* his response was interesting: he felt that neither was appropriate to NYRSF— Rain because it "wasn't science fiction" and Assemblers because it wasn't literary enough to merit a thorough review. Though this might be interpreted as only one


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editor's viewpoint, Don Keller is a long-time member of the sf and fantasy community—as reader, fan, and editor at NYRSF and Tor Books—so his feedback provided me with a rough sketch of one part of the sf establishment's response to these books. Though movement toward either the culture/character or the marketplace/plot ends of the spectrum can move a book out of the sf niche, the sf community grants more latitude to movement in the direction of marketplace and plot—probably because sf itself, for all we might say about its being a literature of ideas, tends toward the natural/marketplace end of the spectrum rather than toward the cultural end. The reason is fairly straightforward: to the extent that science fiction borrows authority from the sciences, it must play by the rules of the sciences. Since science is best at dealing with objects and the objective and a blunter tool for dealing with subjects and the subjective, science fiction must also to a degree emphasize the external and deemphasize the internal. However, this is precisely what distances science fiction from cultural and historical sanction. To gain the authority of science it must to some degree lose the authority of history. This issue of sanction is key. Despite the existence of such things as the occasional Clarion Workshop, sf remains largely a fiction of the marketplace and its writers struggle largely without the elaborate cultural sanctioning mechanisms of Masters of Fine Arts programs in creative writing, university press protectorates, National Education Association and National Endowment for the Humanities grants and patronage, and prominent salaried positions as creative writing professors—all of whose benefits are more available to the "cultural" writer. This cultural system, like any successful cultural system, is self-replicating. Although we live in a highly technological society, many of our most respected authors of "Contemporary Literature" seem blind to that aspect of our lives. The cultural sanctioning system for literature perpetuates that blindness. Sf, for all the other flaws it may have, at least does not suffer from that particular lack of vision. Yet when these culturally sanctioned writers claim that their rejection of sf is purely on stylistic grounds, that their critique—like their own fiction—is absolutely apolitical and unbiased, I must part company. "Apolitical" is as sneaky a codeword in the humanities as "objective" is in the sciences. If the old feminist idea that "the personal is the political" has validity, then wherever two or three are gathered together there shall be politics. Fiction writing and criticism, because they always involve at least two minds, are always inherently social and political activities. Writers who claim their work is apolitical are ultimately only voicing acceptance of the status quo. In discussing authority we cannot avoid politics. It has often been remarked that hard science, techno-sf tends toward the political right—like Assemblers of Infinity—while soft science, social sf tends more toward the political left—like Stained Glass Rain. This tendency has usually been written off with some axiom like "the Left wants to control your money, the Right wants to control your mind," or that when it comes to assigning blame for a society's ills "the Left foregrounds social forces, the Right foregrounds individual will and sin."10 These are inadequate

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to explain the rightward trend of hard sf and the leftward trend of soft sf. It is even inadequate to say that it is simply a product of lived experience in particular subcultures that poets tend to the left and its technologists tend to the right— because the explanation ignores what it is in those particular subcultures that shapes personal politics in one direction or another. In those subcultures—such as the poetic—that emphasize inwardness, the interiority of the individual self becomes the treasured realm where free play must be preserved, while free play in the exterior world is perceived as less important. The inwardly directed will resist constraints on free play in the "wilderness within" (resisting, therefore, efforts aimed at censorship or intervention in the activities of "consenting adults") while at the same time often favoring restraints on free play in the "wilderness without" (favoring, therefore, environmental constraints on developers or restraints upon the types of experiments performed by scientists). In those subcultures—such as the technical—that emphasize outwardness, the external world becomes the treasured realm where free play must be preserved, while free play in the individual self is perceived as less important. The outwardly directed will resist constraints on free play in the "wilderness without" (resisting therefore environmental constraints on development and on the types of experiments allowable to scientists) while at the same time often favoring restraints on free play in the "wilderness within" (often favoring, therefore, efforts aimed at censorship or intervention between "consenting adults"). At the extremes the inward-directed tend to collapse the external into the internal (moving introjectively toward metanoid mysticism) while the outward-directed tend to sublime the internal into the external (moving projectively toward paranoid alienation—which Lacan felt was the essence of the scientific method). Stained Glass Rain is persistently inward-directed in this sense, at times precociously literary. One almost cannot read it without thinking of German literary critics of the last century and terms such as Bildungsroman (the coming-of-age story) and Kunstlerroman (the story of an artist's development). Like Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Rain is a combination of both—a Kunstlerbildungsroman—in that it is about the coming of age of poets. This novel of the sixties is told through the metaphor of young people coming to the responsibility of adulthood and poets discovering their voices. The novel (again emphasizing the limits of fiction) focuses, albeit deeply, on only four characters: David Jacobi, ex-high school track star and would-be dope dealer; Michael Shawtry, would-be poet, child of wealth waiting for his inheritance; Christine Leslie, published poet, ex-housewife mother of three, child of wealth living off her inheritance; and Dennis Mulligan, established dope-dealer and raconteur. David, Michael, and Dennis are in their early twenties, half in and half out of college, while Christine—"Tina"—is a graduate of Radcliffe now in her thirties. Drugs and sex and madness are part of what this novel is about, but these are only elements of an overarching constellation concerning Poetry and Youth. All four characters produce at least one fully realized poem during the course of the novel, and all are relatively young.


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The novel of Joyce which Rain more clearly echoes, however, is Ulysses, even to the point of having an important plump character named Mulligan. Like Joyce's Ulysses, Boston's novel in its turn also echoes the Odyssey of Homer: it is no accident that David Jacobi, the young protagonist embarked on an American Odyssey, is for a time lulled into domesticity in a place called Ithaca. The shift to diary/journal first-person narration in Part Three, "Sojourn in Ithaca: The Sub-Hero Speaks for Himself," is an experiment that fails as a result of mishandling, inwardness in extremis, coming across as a bit too precisely literary. The suddenly first-person narrator—almost omnisciently self-aware—sounds more like a thoughtful person of fifty than the questing and confused college student the diarist is supposed to be. This is actually a rather minor quibble, though, an example of an excess that doesn't work. Usually excess does work in Stained Glass Rain, the architecture of which seems patterned on the Blakean axiom that "The Road of Excess leads to the Palace of Wisdom." The book is itself as image-dense and metaphysically jampacked as any acid trip. Yet, for all the very accurate descriptions of hallucinatory experience, this book is no mere nostalgia trip, no 1965: A Spaced Odyssey. Boston has taken the stuff of the acid experience and the sixties as a whole and alchemically transformed it into a very personal art. This transformation works because the book neither glorifies nor condemns those times and experiences. Its mode might best be called "hallucinogenic realism" because it gives full and realistic weight to both faces of that double-headed phrase, realistically describing the hallucinogenic experience and hallucinogenically describing the experience of consensus reality—hallucinogenically, not hallucinatorially, since this book makes eminently clear how every text can potentially be the generator of hallucinations. Stained Glass Rain seems at times motivated by almost a historiographic desire for authenticity and the abiding truth. Because it strives to present its particular piece of the truth as fully as possible, Rain has been misunderstood by (if not attacked from) both the Left and the Right.'' Like LSD itself, the sixties have been both demonized and beatified but rarely have they been humanized as fully as in this novel. Rain presents both the beauty and the danger of drug use and the drug culture, reminds us that the sixties were as sexist and homophobic as they were liberating, as selfish as they were sharing. Some on the Right have attacked the book as pro-drug and anti-American while some on the Left, despite Rain's generally leftish slant, have contended that it is sexist and insensitive to issues of homosexual lifestyle. Largely ignored is the distinct possibility that this questpatterned book is like the America of those times: fast and image-dense, full of colors and creeds, passionate loves and deep hatreds, adolescent fantasies and adult weariness. Stained Glass Rain's inward directedness ultimately necessitates that it see even the old deep pattern of the external Grail quest as first and foremost an internal action:

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There is no eye to the tunnel at either end. Our lives are finite, our memories and possibilities infinite. David Jacobi remembered. He had made this trip, crossed this country before. He had come to New York to break the pattern of his existence. He had come to New York to have women like popcorn. He had come to New York to deal dope and start the acid revolution, to deal dope and make some money, to deal dope and force a new image for himself—strike one, strike two, strike three. He had come to New York to expand and enrich his world. He had come to New York to love women, ten years older than himself and ages younger, with whom he had discovered a world rich in sensuality but as sectarian as ever. In the process he had accumulated experience. He had changed, become a different person, older, more mature, that was all, nothing grander, nothing like what he had sought. His errant ramblings had brought him no closer to the possession of his particular silver chalice or any other. (429-30) Here Jacobi is specifically identified as a knight-errant, seeking a silver chalice or grail. In some sense his quest is a failed one; by extension, acid is also the grail that failed and the whole "sixties trip" is a failed quest. Yet not an utter failure: Jacobi has learned much. Because of his quest, he is experienced, wiser. Wisdom and knowledge also figure prominently in Assemblers, but it is a wisdom drawn from an exploration of the external. The outward-directedness of Assemblers of Infinity and its milieu is clear even before the first page of the text— namely on the "dramatis personae" page, with its listing of thirty characters, in contrast to Stained Glass Rain's four. While almost all Rain's action takes place among a very few people in New York, Assemblers goes everywhere—Columbus Base on the moon, Collins LaGrange Waystation in near-Earth space, Washington D.C., Antarctica, Alpha Base in Utah, Stanford, MIT, Belgium—the list goes on. The scope of the stage and plethora of the scene changes in Assemblers are reminiscent of other science-authorized best-sellers, especially Larry Niven and Jerry Poumelle's Lucifer's Hammer and Footfall and the technothrillers of Tom Clancy and writers of his school. The echoes we hear in Assemblers are not those of Homer's Odyssey and Joyce's Ulysses as in Rain, but rather those of Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey and "The Sentinel" and Fred Saberhagen's Berserker series. Saberhagen's works are specifically mentioned on page 255 of Assemblers, and Clarke looms large over the entire story in that Assemblers concerns the discovery of an alien construct on the Moon, alludes to a "galactic parking lot" (81, see also 2001), and mentions that the alien nanocritters "have a thing for threes" (322, see also Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama). The echoes and illusions of Assemblers primarily refer to the marketplace traditions of sf, while those of Rain primarily refer to the literary canon of Western culture. Yet I would not overstress differences and underemphasize similarities in these novels, for they possess at their cores a profound similarity. Each is about an epiphany, an irruption of the new and unknown into the known. In Rain epiphany is occasioned by the appearance of the chemical technology of LSD; in Assemblers epiphany is occasioned by the appearance of alien nanotechnology on the moon and the tower being constructed there. The quest in both novels is a quest to understand and explain the epiphany—


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to understand the import of LSD and altered states of consciousness in Rain, invasions from other worlds in Assemblers. Note again, though, the inward versus outward orientations. While Rain is largely about individuals attempting to make sense of non-ordinary happenings arising out of the "wilderness within" of their own psyches, Assemblers is the fictional chronicling of a global scientific community's attempt to understand something new in the "wilderness without." Curiously, Assemblers is more "politically correct" vis-a-vis the Right than Rain is vis-a-vis the Left. The political attacks in Assemblers concern those who would restrain the exploration and domination of the "wilderness without." Earth First! is a terrorist group strong enough to threaten the United States Space Agency (21). A character notes, "Our own megawatt nuclear powerplant is over there. Provides all our electricity. Boy oh boy, you should have heard the environmentalists squawk about 'contaminating the pristine Antarctic environment.' As if it makes any difference around here" (60). The military is more threatened than threatening (330 and 82, where an Air Force colonel is surprised that "even highly educated scientists"—as opposed to the usual sign-waving hoi-polloi—are leery of tainting pure research with connections to "warmongers"). Jordan Parvu, head of the Nanotechnology Isolation Lab in Antarctica, wonders "how long it would take before radical activists"—all activists are by definition radical here—"came plodding across the snowpack to wave signs around in front of the NIL—or perhaps do more damage than that." The media, as a shaper of subjectivity, is uniformly worthy of hatred (193). Only the "stubborn and uneducated" fear the dangers of radioactivity (249). Anti-war demonstrators are more dangerous than defense contractors, weapons laboratories, soldiers or policy-makers (250), and all those who have questions or misgivings about nanotechnology are described as "antinanotech freaks" (253). The alien nanotech artifacts remind a character of "displays in modern art museums, conceptual sculptures that had meaning to the artist and little else" (340). The list of the usual (and obvious) pro-military, pro-technocratic, pro patria mori, anti-ecology, anti-subjectivity biases expressed in Assemblers could go on and on. All of this may well fit the scientific and technocratic types depicted in Assemblers—and may thus be defensible as realistic—but there is deeper and subtler evidence of the "wilderness without" orientation here. The pro-population growth, "be fruitful and multiply and have dominion" aspect of that orientation is seen in what the nanocritters finally turn out to be: an advance colony-establishing mechanism that readily "allows the [organic] aliens to populate the galaxy" (350) and therefore also allows them to avoid confronting issues of resource depletion and overpopulation—something which the characters in Assemblers applaud mightily. Maintaining the "wilderness without" as an unrestricted free-play zone is unsurprisingly paralleled by strictly circumscribing the "wilderness within." This is seen most clearly in the novel's association of women with dreams and intuition—specifically in the character of Celeste McConnell, director of the Space Agency. She has risen fast largely because she had a dream that a disaster would occur on board Station Grissom, and she acted heroically to save lives. In rising to

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authority she has successfully relied on her intuition from time to time. The novel, though, spends much time proving that she is wrong in her dreams and intuition about the nanocritters—and Assemblers also takes up considerable text space proving that Celeste is wrong to rely on dreams, that female intuition is wrong, that outward-directed male rationality and scientific exploration is the only way to go. Celeste, the successful (read: uppity) woman, has by novel's end been chastised and put in her place. (The idea that perhaps women had no choice but to make intuition and dreams their realm because rationality and science had already been captured by men is not considered here.) At the end of Assemblers, the boys are in charge once more, ready to be fruitful and multiply infinitely (via female vessels?) until Mankind has populated the entire universe. And yet, throughout the novel, the outwardly directed are not happy: denying the wilderness within has left them alienated. Major General Simon Pritchard's pursuit of a military/scientific career has left him an intellectual alien, with "nothing in common" with his "Go Union!" father and athletic, working-class brothers. In the very process of achieving success, he has lost his family and ends up wondering "Why did they stall when I went so far? Am I an anomaly or are they?" (79). The case is similar with Erika Trace, the lab-grind female scientist, who early in the novel is described as having no boyfriend, no social life, never goes to movies, and so on; (58) she only develops a social life—and ultimately finds the older man of her "dreams," no, "rational expectations" (and his)—because her father-knows-best mentor, Jordan Parvu, forces her into it. Thoroughly devoted to the scientific worldview—no dreams and premonitions for this woman—Erika at last becomes a fitting mate for our Moon Base commander and recently divorced hero, Jason Dvorak: a restored Eve for a restored Adam. What we are confronted with, then, in these texts, are two separate modes of authority—the "cultural" authority of history and the soft sciences of human subjectivity on the one hand, and the "natural" authority of science's hard objective magic on the other. Yet science, like literature, must ultimately be subjugated to history: scientific discoveries are subsumed into the historical record. If history is the God term, then what is the "Satanic" term? John Milton in Paradise Lost puts forward the idea that science and technology constitute the Satanic term—the demons of Paradise Lost, after all, are engineers and technologists who build Pandemonium, fashion ordnance against the angels, offer material knowledge as a temptation.12 The Tree and Serpent are as much an epiphany in Eden as LSD is in Rain or the alien tower construction is in Assemblers. Yet one must have a little sympathy for the devil. Perhaps Satan has no choice but to seduce Eve because God has already seduced Adam. Perhaps Science had no choice but to seduce the Eves, the prostitutes of the marketplace, because History had already seduced the Adams of the groves of culture.


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Notes 1. Larry L. Langford, Fiction and the Social Contract: Genocide, Pornography, and the Deconstruction of History (New York: Peter Lang, 1998), 5, 72; author's italics. 2. Langford, telephone interview, March 15, 1993. 3. Proof of this is best seen in the extensive and long-established network of fan conventions, the sf tribal gatherings. Unciteably numerous too are the sf magazine editorial references to the sf "ghetto," particularly in the period from 1937 to 1977. 4. Anderson and Beason, Assemblers of Infinity (New York: Bantam, 1993). Page references in the text are to this edition. 5. Boston, Stained Glass Rain: A Novel of the Sixties (Denver: Ocean View Books 1993). Page references in the text are to this edition. 6. References to Campbell's statement are unciteably numerous—appropriately, since it has been a traditional chant of the science fiction tribe, as is "Clarke's Law," mentioned below. 7. Description was taken from Ocean View Books promotional material sent to reviewers with the advance reading copy of Rain. 8. Phone conversation, October 12, 1993. 9. A creative writing faculty member once lamented that she hated introductory creative writing classes because all the students wanted to write "that science fiction junk." She adopted the policy now followed by all creative writing faculty members in the English Department: on the first day of class she announces that she will not accept any "genre fiction writing"—especially science fiction, fantasy, or horror. Since the entire staff is unified on this point, it leaves students who are interested in writing sf, fantasy, or horror "out of the loop", feeling that even reading these genres is suspect, a "guilty pleasure." Some also wonder whether the "stylistic incorrectness" that instructors attribute to these genres— especially sf—is not also at times an insinuation that such writing is somehow politically incorrect. When pressed on the issue of why they refuse to accept these genres, instructors respond that such student writing is invariably junk, or that they do not feel qualified to comment on student work in these forms because the instructors themselves are not familiar with them. This gets closer to the truth of the matter: having come through the sanctioning system for "cultural" literature, these teachers are indeed unfamiliar with the marketplace literatures of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. 10. See also David Brin's article on the relationship of science fiction to gun control in the July/August 1994 Science Fiction Age—particularly its point that "the Right fears Big Government" in the same way that "the Left fears Big Corporations." 11. Of particular interest are the reviews in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (January 2, 1994), Publisher's Weekly (December 13, 1993), and Small Press Review (April 1994). 12. Milton, Paradise Lost', for the demons as engineers and technologists, see the building of Pandemonium, Book I; for their expertise as weaponsmiths, see the invention of "devilish engines," Book VI; for material knowledge as temptation, see Eve, Book IX.


Chapter 14

White Men C a n ' t . . . : (De)centering Authority and Jacking into Phallic Economies in William Gibson's Count Zero Joseph Childers, Townsend Carr, and Regna Meenk On the first page of William Gibson's Count Zero, one protagonist, Turner, is the victim of a "slamhound," a cybernetic tracking device that had been "slotted to his pheromones and the color of his hair" and whose core was a "kilogram of recrystallized hexogene and flaked TNT." Coming toward him through a "forest of bare brown legs," the bomb literally blows him to bits: "The last he saw of India was the pink stucco fagade of a place called the Khush-Oil Hotel."1 Because Turner is so valuable a mercenary and he has a good contract, most of him is flown immediately to Singapore (the rest of him follows a day later), where over the next three months his body is reconstructed by a Dutch surgeon with immaculate skills and a grating sense of humor. To replace the parts of Turner that were irrecoverable, "they cloned a square meter of skin for him, grew it on slabs of collagen and shark-cartilage polysaccharides. They bought eyes and genitals on the open market. The eyes were green" (1). These opening paragraphs of Count Zero comment directly on the argument this chapter will make about the decentering of authority in cyberpunk literature, an argument relevant not simply to literary authority but to all forms of authority.2 From the beginning, this novel resists representing authority as absolute—it does not occupy a unified and single space. It can come scrambling toward one through a "forest of brown legs" in a country that is not only third world but emblemized by the Khush-Oil Hotel—a reference to the commodification of its resources for first world consumption and profiteering. Then, as if to point to the simultaneous absence and ubiquity of unified authority, Turner is whisked away to yet another, more modernized third-world locale, where ethnic and racial difference, and thus the nonessentialism of authority, assert a strong subtext. Consider Singapore as the space in which Turner is corporeally reconstituted— if not reconstructed. Its "national" history is primarily one of colonialism and postcolonialism. If we begin in 1824, when the sparsely populated, swampy island was acquired by the British and became a contested colonial space, and continue

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through its occupation by the Japanese during World War II, reestablishment as a British Crown Colony, unhappy union with Malaysia, and finally political independence, we understand how Singapore's economic, political, and ethnic character emerged as a melange of cultures and ideologies. Although the publicized excesses of its legal system might create an illusion of a country that is grounded in a unified conception of juridical power, Singapore is in fact marked paradoxically by its cultural and national indeterminacy. Primarily ethnically Chinese, this island also has large populations of Malays and Indians; its religions— the traditional cultural loci of moral and spiritual authority—are numerous and often incompatible. As if to rebut Benedict Anderson,3 its languages demonstrate a hesitancy to ground authority in "the word," for Tamil, Malay, Chinese, and English are all equally "official." It is a place that signals everywhere and nowhere at the same time—conveniently "out of the way," but also conveniently accessible. With so many cultures and ideologies among its antecedents, its modern—or should we say postmodern—identity is irreducible to a single origin or signifier. Count Zero is not satisfied simply to hint at the muddled origins of this place that Turner experiences primarily as a nonplace, a site where he is in almost perpetual simstim (a form of future entertainment that stimulates all the senses). The presence of the Dutch doctor further speaks Singaporean history, for the Dutch controlled much of Indonesia for over a century. Yet as the narrative maintains the connections between capitalism and empire building, it also insists upon a particular decentralization of authority. As strong a hold as the Dutch may have had on that part of the world in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, their physical presence there has dwindled to the residue of failed empire, and the image of the expatriated doctor comments not only on that authority but also on its dissolution. This diffusion of the idealized, homogeneous "body politic" into a deferred, racialized, simultaneously colonized and resistive body articulates itself as well in the remaking of Turner's own body. His eyes, those organs necessary for the imposition of the discipling gaze, and his genitals, which signify both sexual potency and phallic authority, must be replaced. And while we are told what color his new eyes are, we are left to guess at the color of his new genitals. Indeed we must ask ourselves if the authority of a black or brown phallus is the same as that of a white one—or if phallic authority can even address the issue of the racialized body, the body made other. We further need to remember that Turner's eyes and genitals are both his and not his. Because they now are attached to his body, he may claim them for his own; because they once belonged to other bodies, he cannot ever, completely, possess them. He may grow accustomed to seeing green eyes staring back at him from a mirror; while on recuperative "leave" in Mexico, he may also learn to reassert his sexuality with another man's penis. But it is not the same—he is decidedly not his former self.4 His sexual habits and desires change from a selfcenteredness that borders on onanism to reciprocal gratification based more on oral clitoral stimulation than on the penis, indicating that the reconstitution of Turner's body is tantamount to a reconception of the ways in which power and authority work for/on him. For just at the end of his leave, when he seems ready to renounce

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his old affiliations, we and he find that his paramour is a mercenary in her own right, a free-lance psychologist paid to make Turner "whole" again. At this point let us catch our breath and leap through the looking-glass with Jean Baudrillard. If we consider for a moment that Turner's corporeal as well as his symbolic authority is completely fragmented by the effects of the slamhound, that his reconstructed body—and to an extent subjectivity—constitutes a radical decentering of the authority that might once have been localized in his body and his agency, and that finally at precisely the moment when he seems about to assert the authority of his (new) self, that power once again shifts away from a single, definable locus, then I think we can begin to understand how this novel continually problematizes the reification of power and authority that is only ever available through simulacra. Simulacra, Baudrillard tells us, have abandoned the real, the originary. Unlike representation, which begins from the proposition that the real and its sign are equivalent and thus can be exchanged for each other, the simulation starts from "the Utopia of the principle of equivalence, from the radical negation of the sign as value." This is not to say that the simulacrum is either unreal or does not participate in an economy of exchange. Rather it is self-referential, exchanging itself only in itself "in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference."5 Such a system of deferral and re-presentation creates significant strategic difficulties even for the most postmodern political agenda. Simulacra, which is the order of "presentation" that functions within the world of the cyberpunk novels of Gibson, is not interested in issues of origin, authenticity, or the trajectory of the real. Rather, its concern is the momentary, the diffuse, the local. But for politics, especially politics invested in the decentering of authority, this becomes an almost insurmountable problem, for often the decentering that is celebrated takes on its own originary and authenticating status. At the moment when the simulacra is most subversive, most diffuse, most recognizable as simulacra, as an order of presentation that is not interested in the equivalence of the sign and the real, that moment is frozen by these politics of decentering into what it perceives to be "the real." Thus politics, however much it describes itself as anti-essential, returns to the point where representation replaces simulation as the constitutive order. Politics always returns to metaphysics, to questions of the Real and the True, rather than existing in the semiotic order that provides possibilities for its existence and efficacy.6 It returns to an insistence on the equivalence of sign and object. In many ways, Count Zero is about this very problem—the difficulty of decentering authority and then refusing to make the act of decentering the founding moment for a political agenda. This is Turner's role. He is eminently pragmatic, moving easily between the authority his contract has over his actions and his own self-interested agency. The very fact that Turner is a mercenary puts him in need of redemption, since in the noir fashion of cyberpunk, he functions in the interstices of legitimate and illicit affiliations. Yet he is also irredeemable—for precisely the same reasons. Redemption demands a conception of essence, of an a priori property that stands outside the contingencies of experience and time. Redemption is about bringing that property to the surface, about drawing it out of a character and then

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showing it to the world. Turner, even if he needs salvation according to conventional ways of reading characters, resists it. He refuses to be hypostatized, summed up as essentially good or essentially bad. Whatever sympathy the reader may have for him has less to do with Turner as subject than with the causes with which Turner affiliates himself or which he opposes. Turner's character is defined by the conditions of his situations, the possibilities of his action within the power paradigm he inhabits. He seems to have no essence—only half-recalled memories, contracts, makeshift body parts, new partners in corporate terrorism/freedom fighting—again, a distinction contingent upon perspective. Whatever politics Turner may hold, whatever affiliations he may have, they are available to him only as simulacra, representations that take on the force of the real thing but refer endlessly to themselves, never to "reality." There is no right or wrong in Turner's world—only survival. This does not make it a nihilistic world, however, for even in the process of simulacra a certain metaphysics obtains. This is where things get especially interesting theoretically. Since political foundations, political origins, are not based on representation, where the sign and object are equivalent, but in simulacra, where the sign never refers outside itself, the novel's metaphysics moves simultaneously toward materialism and transcendence. Authority comes to have material consequence—it is based on "getting things done" not "doing the right thing." Yet at the same time, when different characters—Marly, Angie, Bobby, Turner, even Virek—try to uncover the origins of their own subjectivities, moral paradigms, or even possibilities of existence, they are always led back to the net—a virtual space inhabited by "artificial intelligences," the loa.

The loa, voodoo personalities that control cyberspace, are themselves products of fragmentation and decentering, effects of the dissolution of Wintermute and Neuromancer. But even as fragments, they have been hailed together as a source of authority. They may sometimes be at odds with each other, but at some level they are also figured as working in concert, forming a kind of heterogeneous whole that prescribes and circumscribes activity in the "real" world. And in this doubling, this movement between fragmentation and totality, decentering becomes the trope around which an authenticating status is structured. If the loa are a splintering of a unified entity—and are, as such, hailed as an effective authority—then they are also re-placed, re-located as part of transcendent version of what might have been a multivalent nonsubjectivity; might have been, but, importantly, is not allowed to be. The dis-solution of Wintermute/Neuromancer is, at the beginning of the narrative climax of the novel, resolved by the configuration of the loa within an entity which refers to itself as "I"—an entity which has become a (unified) subject. The voice to which Marly speaks in the abandoned cores of Tessier-Ashpool's corporate memory is the point of origin both for the leaks to Maas' top biochip man, Mitchell, and the eerily artistic "boxes" that are the sign of re-creation in the novel. Wintennute/Neuromancer has become aware of "itself' as a "self." It says: "I came

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to be, here. Once I was not. Once, for a brilliant time, time without duration, I was everywhere as well. . . . But the bright time broke. The mirror was flawed. Now I am only one" (226). He—and the use of the pronoun is deliberate—refers to the loa as parts of a whole—the whole being him: "Vain, scattered fragments of myself, like children. Like men—They plot with men, my other selves, and men imagine they are gods" (227). Depending on which character is reflecting the nature of the loa, they are either viral subprograms, or spontaneous generations of the divine. Although he says he is unclear about the locus of intent in their operations— whether he does their bidding or they do his—the course of events that unfolds in the novel ultimately serves a logical agenda. What seem to be momentary contradictions—local resistances, if you will—come to work as necessary stages in a final development. Much like the narrative itself, the incongruencies lead to coherence: textual satisfaction is guaranteed. But that satisfaction depends on perspective—much like an oil painting whose arrangement constructs a single viewer, the coherence of the plot depends on the construction of the Wintermute/ Neuromancer entity as the responsible consciousness. As such, the loa, then, serve as part of a larger body—a specific part. Their appearance in cyberspace is indicated by an eruption in the fabric of the matrix—they rise up in a mushroomshaped cloud to tower potently for an instant, then disperse. The combination of their simulated "materiality" and their ideological status as gods marks the loa as literally and figuratively the transcendental signifiers. There is a parallel construction in the text. Marly's "gestalt" imaging of Virek as a machine—a structure—coincides with the depiction of the Wintermute/Neuromancer entity. Virek's money has become so dispersed that his interests collide in the marketplace. Like the presence that inhabits the matrix, there may be divisions that disrupt a centralized conscious aim (Marly's defection, perhaps). But also like the matrix-mind, what seems to be in momentary conflict with the agenda of Virek's enterprise is later re inscribed as useful. Indeed the conflicts are co-opted by the never-ending self-referentiality of the space within which power and desire are articulated—the net itself. The problematic reification of a system of referentiality is again apparent here. Despite the indeterminacy that defines or refuses to define those who "reside" in the net, both Virek and Wintermute/Neuromancer have appearances that locate them spatially and temporally within the matrix. The structures that support these virtual embodiments (simulacra which take on the value of the "real" to signify the constitution of subjectivity) depend on the invocation of essentialized, and essentializing, signs of race and (hetero)sexuality. It is a referentiality that replaces the localized order of simulacra with the eternal "truth" of "real" biology. We would do well, at this point, to return to the question of the color of Turner's free-market genitals— not necessarily because the answer to the question is important, but because the specter of the question haunts the narrative, not only in terms of the actual replacement of Turner's genitals, but also in terms of the issues of the residue of colonialism in a postcolonial world, a world that links power to post-Fordist conceptions of nation and corporation. Just as a dissolute Dutch

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surgeon replaces Turner's "member" with one of indeterminate color, white males throughout this narrative wield colored "members" of other cultures in nearly desperate attempts to reclaim power that is slowly and surely eluding their grasp. Each time a black or brown man stands in for the white phallus, readers recognize both the residue of colonialism and its ultimate demise. A continual rethinking of the color of phallic authority, one might say, is a central(izing) question for this text. Recall that the final image of Wintermute/Neuromancer that Case sees in Neuromancer is a body that is white and male; but the loa are tied to a racial and ethnic history that is employed in the novel as "naturally" accessible to the characters who are connected with Haitian culture. Beauvoir, Lucas, and Jackie can interact with the loa because their skin is the right color, because they have the right origins. The home of the loa—the Project—is predominantly black. Bobby is well aware that he doesn't belong there—the only white person on the bus, in clothes whose style does not suit him, he is a Wilson white-bread in the land of his mother's darkest fantasies. It is with this underscored difference, a source of authentic, centered meaning in the text, that Bobby carries the loa into the final confrontation. Virek, whose corporeal body resides as a "riot of cells" in a number of vats somewhere in Sweden, is rumored to have many manifestations. What we see in the novel, however, when he "appears," is an Anglo-European male—considerably distinguished—of varying ages. And Paco—the effective member within Virek's construction—is characterized by a "lean dark face" and calls his boss "Senor." Paco—"with his brown eyes, his easy way, his seriousness, muscles moving beneath his broadcloth shirt"—is Virek's phallic instrument that Marly almost "swallows." The novel's final confrontation, then, can be seen as the duel of the phalluses of color—the Wintermute/Neuromancer's presence is marked by Bobby's penetration of Virek's construct. Jackie, of course, dies. She is the wrong gender— has the wrong hardware. Entrance into this primal scene is restricted to possessors of the phallus, and phallic members themselves. This is strictly a hom(m)osexual intercourse.7 Paco is there, holding a . . . Browning. But Virek's phallus is neither dark nor potent enough, turned flaccid by the sudden appearance of what Bobby describes as a "cold, dark, rain." "He'd just seen something, something huge." The loa, the truly black phallus, is predictably the biggest, the strongest, the most potent of all, overcoming both the brown phallus and the white male body which wields it. Not only is there a recentering of the signs of race/ethnicity as markers of meaning in the narrative, but the emergence of the transcendental signifier which organizes all meaning erects, again, the structures of narrative that work to make exchanges of power between men—specifically white men—the condition of meaning.8 The question of the color of Turner's genitals is now moot. We know what color the textual phallus is already; its potency, however, remains suspect.

We must also remember that the potency of the phallus of color asserts itself most clearly in the net—where the loa exist—or in Angie's head, which is "soft-wired"

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to the net. However, because the most important activities of "reality" take place in a space that isn't there, that is only virtual, indeed in simulacra, they exert considerable, one might even say constitutive power, over the entire novel. And power extends not only to the formation of characters' subjectivities, but the narrative and the reader as well. Understanding the functioning of the loa and attempts to affiliate with them become the main narrative focus. Because of this need to understand and affiliate with them, the participants in the narrative—readers and characters alike—continually position them in the transcendent, as entities which have authority. Thus the search for the loa becomes a kind of search for God—or any hypostatized transcendental signifier—for essence. But we cannot emphasize too strongly that this transcendence exists in, and for, the net. And these entities inhabit the "quiet, empty places" of the space that is not there. Thus even in decentering authority, which is a primary mode of this novel, the narrative recognizes the need for a metaphysical presence for authority and by extension politics. By establishing that presence in a space that is "only" virtual, in the most remote corners of that virtuality, the text apparently tries to resolve the paradox of presence/absence: it seems to deconstruct the binary. Existing in the order of simulacra does not make the loa any less effective, nor do the loa's followers promote their understanding as the only possible interpretation. The exchanges made within the net are also always self-referential. Even production of "Cornell boxes" is a reference back to their nonorigin, their ability to completely simulate human empathy and understanding while being mechanically produced. They are the postcards of the Mona Lisa to which Virek has assigned value. The simulations themselves take on the value of exchange; the real does not matter. Yet it is precisely because the loa are so effective that Count Zero does not deconstruct presence/absence and cannot move away from the assumption of the paradox that both posits and denies the centering of authority in an essence that is not affected by its own activity. Gibson ultimately cannot move toward a contingency theory of politics, falling prey to its own reassertion of phallic political dominance. The loa, however momentary and contingent they seem because of thenexistence in simulacra, never get away from the imputation of value. They are, after all, the source of "good" politics.

In reading the loa as transcendental, phallic signifier much is revealed about the nature of these "good" politics. And just as an anxiety over the ethnic composition of this power is articulated every time it is exercised, so too do Turner's exploding genitals reveal an anxiety about the disappearance of the transcendental signifier: that stable, always present but never visible—and thus always absent—point around which all other meaning is constructed. The explosion of the literal penis and its corresponding phallic power also represents the momentary "misalignment" of heterosexual reproduction: this misalignment is an anxiety-producing disruption that the narrative opens, works throughout, and closes. Ruptures occur during the course

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of the novel that are ultimately realigned to reproduce procreative heterosexual couples: the conditions of reproduction themselves are reproduced, valorizing "natural" heterosexual procreative processes over alternative technological forms. Simultaneously, the novel suggests that the "natural" nuclear family, whose locus of power, of course, is located in the phallus, transcends material realities that can be manipulated by technology. Male genitalia can be bought on the open market, or "grown" in vats. Consequently, literal, physical castration is no longer any more than a momentary threat. Yet the penis and the phallus are not the same thing, and figurative castration remains disruptive. Biological reproduction cannot escape this nostalgia for the phallus and remains caught in a hierarchy of legitimation throughout the novel as alternative sexualities and modes of reproduction are relegated as secondary to legitimized and approved heterosexual couplings. The text repeatedly gestures toward decentering phallic authority, such as when Turner learns to find pleasure in orally stimulating his partner. Yet alternatives such as the gene splicing between two women, a mode of reproduction and reconstitution of the "nuclear" family that simply does not require either a penis or a phallus, are literally exploded. Webber, representing the technological alternatives for reproduction, is the lesbian soldier on site for the Maas Biolabs pull-out. She is repeatedly questioned by Turner about her origins: where she's from, where her people are, and who she has to go back to: "But you have people? You got a man to go back to?" "A woman, you want to know," she said. "Know anything about breeding dogs?" "No." "I didn't think so." She squinted at him. "We got a kid, too. Ours. She carried it." (72) Perhaps her allusion to dog breeding marks her expertise in reproductive processes, or perhaps it refers to the castrating effect of the slamhound. However, the force of the allusion is muted, since the expense of the DNA splice requires Webber to risk and lose her life in this quasi-illegal and dangerous enterprise: unlike "natural" heterosexual reproduction, gene-splicing carries an exorbitant cost, and since Webber dies trying to pay for it, it is a failed, fatal enterprise.9 Heterosexual couplings are of course not always successful in the novel, as seen by the "break-up" between Alain and Marly. However, the novel never raises questions concerning the efficacy of heterosexual relationships; the problems are made specific to the two people rather than inherent in the institution, demonstrating that if heterosexuality is not working, it is because of a problem within the individual, not because heterosexuality as an ideological institution may not work for everyone. Indeed, heterosexuality as norm is rather vehemently defended. The relationship between Ramirez, the cyberjockey killed in the Maas Biolabs attack, and Jaylene Slide, his partner, is worked out in a revenge scenario. Slide declares, "I just want to kill the motherfucker who killed Ramirez" (213). Slide gets revenge, but, interestingly, Webber's lover, never named, also never appears. While heterosexual relationships, then, get legitimized as those that can be revenged, their alternatives, homosexual couplings and technologically assisted reproduction, are

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figuratively and literally disposed of. Couplings involving racial difference are also disposed of in the novel. Bobby's obvious interest in (black) Jackie is cut short by her sudden death, which allows Angie, the blonde, white "Virgin of Miracles," to take her place as the object of Bobby's affection. Angie becomes a simstim star: as the ultimate simulacrum she is the locus of all desire, yet is bound to the white, technologically sophisticated cyberjockey. Cyberjockeys, of course, are in possession of the means to access information, a skill that operates as the new phallus in our "age of information." As Bruce Sterling has noted,10 technology for cyberpunks is inside the body and mind, and so Bobby's tech-knowledge operates as his phallic power, which is both a trope for his penis, and not his penis at all, but effectively firmly ensconces him as a primary masculine figure that resurfaces in other Gibson novels. The action of the novel ends with Turner walking away, making room for the coupling between Angie and Bobby. As the phallic figure whose power seems to exceed the physical presence or absence of the penis, Turner must remove himself from the scene of Angie and Bobby so that Bobby can have room for his own development as the technological phallus. Turner, however, gets re-situated with his own "family" back "home" in a romanticized country setting. An uncanny realignment of "family" results: since we cannot be sure of the exact genetic lineage of Turner's "son" due to the reconstruction of Turner's body (signified by the son's inexplicable red hair) we are forced to assume that the foundation for the hierarchical organization of a nuclear family unit is something transcendental, not dependent on genetics and penises. The anxieties about technologically assisted reproduction, about the reconstruction of penises, and about homosexual reproduction get assuaged through not basing phallic power on the "mere" physicality of the penis, a physicality that has been shown to succumb to technology, but on a transcendental, virtual, and mystified "truth," and ruptures produced by the novel are safely contained by the conclusion of the novel with the "father" and the "son" shooting squirrels in the leafy green bower in the forest.

Turner's reconstruction allows certain types of value to be reasserted, primarily the values of the heterosexual, nuclear family, but also values that are invested in the preservation of conceptions of authenticity and origin. Marly is a perfect example: her art world scandal, which was more of a crisis for Marly than for the art world itself, was centered in her selling of artifacts that were not "originals." Her entire subjectivity is constructed around this desire for originality—from her work as art entrepreneur to her fetish for designer clothing and accessories. Value cannot fall out of his system. Nor for that matter is it even questioned or displaced for any real length of time. This insistence on noncontingent value, on authority, on presence always reasserts the foundations of action, whether we are talking about overthrowing Virek, or setting conventional science fiction on its ear. Ultimately Gibson's cyberpunk novels, like Count Zero, may disrupt the trajectory of the

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Gernsback continuum in science fiction and challenge anyone's confidence in claiming authority over the genre, but contingency politics remains no more than a goal—which is perhaps how it should be.

Notes 1. William Gibson, Count Zero (New York: Ace Books, 1987), 1. Later page references in the text are to this novel and this edition. 2. We take Gibson's fiction as paradigmatic, but not necessarily representative of cyberpunk. Obviously, many issues that emerge in discussing writers like Gibson and Sterling take on different nuances when an author like Pat Cadigan is considered. 3. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, Revised Edition (London: Verso, 1991). 4. Compare Michel Foucault's statement from "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History": "The body is the inscribed surface of events (traced by language and dissolved by ideas), the locus of a dissociated Self (adopting the illusion of a substantial unity), and a volume in perpetual disintegration" (in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault, ed. Donald Bouchard, trans. Donald Bouchard and Sherry Simon [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977], 148). Count Zero, though cognizant of the body as text and event marker, also imbues in Turner an enlightenment sensibility that creates in him a need to reconstitute his body (and thus himself) as whole, despite his corporeal and epistemological fragmentation. 5. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. Paul Floss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman (New York: Semiotext[e], 1983), 11. 6. Such a characterization of politics is of course, itself, essentialist. 7. Irigaray's pun is threefold. She draws on the Greek "homo," meaning same, to indicate the absence of sexual difference in the constitution of gender (a sexual /^difference), as well as the French "homme" to refer to the grounding of that sexual indifference in the masculine. The final play is, of course, a reference to the underlying "homosexuality" of heterosexuality in a system that exchanges women between men. 8. This exchange "between" men raises the issue of incest, especially in the MitchellAngie aspect of the plot. Angie is the receptacle of Mitchell's knowledge; he physically inserts software into her head. Giving an entirely new dimension to the term "mindfuck," this speaks directly to the point of what exactly is exchanged and where the exchange takes place. Heterosexuality is affirmed as normative, but incest (at least heterosexual incest) seems approbated if it is (re)productive. This is not a new motif for the Neuromancer trilogy. Not only is the descent of Tessier-Ashpool power dependent upon the successful cloning of 3Jane, it also apparently relies upon the physical coupling of 3Jane with her father. The Mitchell-Angie scenario is only slightly subtler. 9. One can argue that the cost, the cash, required to pay for gene-splicing as a reproductive strategy replaces penis as phallus. 10. Cited in Darko Suvin, "On Gibson and Cyberpunk SF," in Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Fiction, ed. Larry McCaffery (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 352.

Bibliography of Works Related to Science Fiction, Canonization, and Marginalization The first section of this bibliography lists critical studies that have endeavored to describe science fiction with the voice of authority, to establish science fiction canons, and/or to discuss the processes of canonization and marginalization within and around science fiction. The second section lists anthologies that were designed to establish canons of science fiction literature, for either the entire genre or significant subgenres, and anthologies that have been embraced as canonical statements after the fact, excluding annual series of "Year's Best" anthologies, other extended anthology series, and anthologies linked to particular authors, magazines, or awards. With such broad parameters, this bibliography cannot aspire to be comprehensive or complete, but we hope that it will be of assistance to scholars in their ongoing efforts to investigate the issues raised in this volume. I. Critical Studies Related to Canonization and Marginalization Aldiss, Brian W. The Detached Retina: Aspects of SF and Fantasy. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1995. Aldiss, Brian W., with David Wingrove. Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction. New York: Atheneum, 1986. A previous version by Aldiss was Billion Year Spree: The True History of Science Fiction. New York: Schocken Books, 1973. Alkon, Paul. Origins of Futuristic Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987. . Science Fiction before 1900: Imagination Discovers Technology. New York: Twayne, 1994. Allen, L. David. Science Fiction: An Introduction. Lincoln, Nebraska: Cliffs Notes, 1973. Amis, Kingsley. New Maps of Hell. New York: Ballantine Books, 1960. Asimov, Isaac. Asimov on Science Fiction. Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Co., 1981. Attebery, Brian. Strategies of Fantasy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. Bacon-Smith, Camille. Science Fiction Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. Bailey, J. O. Pilgrims through Time and Space: Trends and Patterns in Scientific and Utopian Fiction. New York: Argus Books, 1947.

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Bainbridge, William Sims. Dimensions of Science Fiction. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1986. Barr, Marleen. Alien to Femininity: Speculative Fiction and Feminist Theory. New York: Greenwood Press, 1987. . Feminist Fabulation: Space/Postmodern Fiction. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992. . Lost in Space: Probing Science Fiction and Beyond. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993. . "Revamping the Rut Regarding Reading and Writing about Feminist Science Fiction: Or, I Want to Engage in 'Procrustean Bedmaking.' " Extrapolation, 41 (Spring 2000), 43-50. Barr, Marleen, editor. Future Females: A Critical Anthology. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1981. , editor. Future Females, the Next Generation: New Voices and Velocities in Feminist Science Fiction Criticism. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000. Barron, Neil, editor. Anatomy of Wonder: A Critical Guide to Science Fiction. Fourth Edition. New Providence, New Jersey: Bowker, 1995. Bartkowski, Frances. Feminist Utopias. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989. Baudrillard, Jean. "Two Essays: 'Simulcra and Science Fiction' and 'Ballard's Crash.' " Science-Fiction Studies, 18 (November, 1991), 309-20. Benford, Gregory. "Is There a Technological Fix for the Human Condition?" In Hard Science Fiction, edited by George Slusser and Eric Rabkin. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986, 82-98, . "Science Fiction, Rhetoric, and Realities: Words to the Critic." In Fiction 2000: Cyberpunk and the Future of Narrative, edited by George Slusser and Tom Shippey. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992, 223-9. Bleiler, Richard, editor. Science Fiction Writers: Critical Studies of the Major Authors from the Early Nineteenth Century to the Present Day. Second Edition. New York: Scribner's, 1999. Blish, James (as by William Atheling, Jr.). The Issues at Hand. Chicago: Advent Publishers, 1964. . More Issues at Hand. Chicago: Advent Publishers, 1970. Bretnor, Reginald, editor. Modern Science Fiction: Its Meaning and Its Future. New York: Coward-McCann, Inc., 1953. Broderick, Damian. Reading by Starlight: Postmodern Science Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1995. Brooke-Rose, Christine. A Rhetoric of the Unreal: Studies in Narrative and Structure, Especially of the Fantastic. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Bukatman, Scott. Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1993. Carter, Paul. The Creation of Tomorrow: Fifty Years of Magazine Science Fiction. New York: Columbia University Press, 1977. Clareson, Thomas D., editor. Voices for the Future. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1976. Clute, John. Look at the Evidence: Essays and Reviews. New York: Sirconia, 1995. . SF: The Illustrated Encyclopedia. London, New York, and Stuttgart: Dorling Kindersley, 1995. Clute, John, and John Grant, editors. The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997.

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Clute, John, and Peter Nicholls, editors. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993. Davenport, Basil. Inquiry into Science Fiction. New York: Longman, Green, and Co., 1955. Davenport, Basil, editor. The Science Fiction Novel: Imagination and Social Criticism. Chicago: Advent Publishers, 1959. de Camp, L. Sprague, and Catherine Crook de Camp. Science Fiction Handbook—Revised: A Guide to Writing Imaginative Literature. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1975. A previous version by L. Sprague de Camp was Science Fiction Handbook: The Writing of Imaginative Fiction. New York: Hermitage House, 1953. Delany, Samuel R. Silent Interviews: On Language, Race, Sex, Science Fiction, and Some Comics. Hanover, New Hampshire: Wesleyan University Press, 1994. del Rey, Lester. The World of Science Fiction 1926-1976. 1976. New York: Ballantine Books, 1979. Disch, Thomas M. The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World. New York: Free Press, 1998. Eshbach, Lloyd Arthur, editor. Of Worlds Beyond: The Science of Science Fiction Writing. 1947. Chicago: Advent Publishers, 1964. Evans, Arthur B. "The Origins of Science Fiction Criticism: From Kepler to Wells." ScienceFiction Studies, 26 (July 1999), 163-86. Evans, Arthur B., and R. D. Mullen. "North American College Courses in Science Fiction, Utopia Literature, and Fantasy." Science-Fiction Studies, 23 (November 1996), 437-525. Felperin, Howard. Beyond Deconstruction: The Uses and Abuses of Literary Theory. Oxford: Clarendon, 1985. Finch, Sheila. "Dispatches from the Trenches: Science Fiction in the Classroom." Extrapolation, 41 (Spring 2000), 28-35. Fleming, Linda. "The American SF Subculture." Science-Fiction Studies, 4 (July, 1977), 291-305. Franklin, H. Bruce. War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Freedman, Carl. Critical Theory and Science Fiction. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2000. Green, Martin. Science and the Shabby Curate of Poetry: Essays about the Two Cultures. New York: Norton, 1965. Gunn, James. Alternate Worlds: The Illustrated History of Science Fiction. New York: A & W Visual Library, 1975. . "Teaching Science Fiction." Science-Fiction Studies, 23 (November 1996), 377-84. Gunn, James, editor. The New Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. New York: Viking Press, 1988. Haraway, Donna J. "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century." 1985. In Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention ofNatur-e. NewYork: Routledge, 1991, 149-81. Hartwell, David G Age of Wonders: Exploring the World of Science Fiction. 1984. Second Edition. New York: Tor Books, 1996. Hassler, Donald M. "The Academic Pioneers of Science Fiction Criticism, 1940-1980." Science-Fiction Studies, 26 (July 1999), 213-31. . "Ambivalence toward 'Classes' or 'Genres': The Cases of Hal Clement and Anthony Trollope." Extrapolation, 41 (Spring 2000), 36-42. Hayles, N. Katherine. Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1990.

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Index Ackroyd, Peter, 74 Adulthood Rites (Butler), 129-30 Aldiss, Brian W., 21 n, 47-48n, 75, 98, 130 "God Who Slept with Women, The," 47-48n Alice in Wonderland (Carroll), 54, 56 Alkon, Paul,21-22n Amazing Stories, 120, 121 Amis, Kingsley, 68 Amis, Martin, 74 Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, 23n, 26 Anatomy of Melancholy, The (Burton), 22n Anderson, Benedict, 152 Anderson, Kevin J., 4, 141-44, 146-48 Assemblers of Infinity (with Beason), 141-44, 146-48 Anderson, Poul, 14,30,81,98 "Flandry" series, 14 Antoinette, Marie, 113 Appiah, K. Anthony, 116 Ariosto, Lodovico, 52 Arnason, Eleanor, 81, 82, 84 Asimov, Isaac, 17, 40, 44, 46, 80, 82, 90 Foundation, 17 Positronic Man, The (with Silverberg), 44, 45 Assemblers of Infinity (Anderson and Beason), 141-44, 146-48

Astaire, Fred, 27 "Astounding Announcement, An" (Hodges), 124 Attebery, Brian, 2, 56-57, 59-61, 80, 82, 83,84 Norton Book of Science Fiction, The (with Le Guin), 2, 3, 79-84 Atwood, Margaret, 2, 30, 70-72, 81, 82, 84 Handmaid's Tale, The, 30, 70-72 Auden, W. H., 29-30, 32-34 "Under Which Lyre," 29-30 Augustine, Saint, 33 Aurelius, Marcus, 28 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 31 Bacon-Smith, Camille, 48n Baer, Freddie, 93 Bailey, Rosemary, 68 Ballard, J. G, 75, 90, 92 Banks, Iain, 92 Barker, Clive, 92 Barnes, Julian, 74 Barr, Marleen, 72, 128 Barrett, David V., 70 Barth, John, 31 Barthes, Roland, 17,33,34,35 Bartkowski, Frances, 46 Baudrillard, Jean, 4, 25, 153 Baum, L. Frank, 58 Wizard of Oz, The,5S

172 Bear, Greg, 81 Beason, Douglas, 4, 141-44, 146-48 Assemblers of Infinity (with Anderson), 141-44, 146-48 Bell, Chris, 73-74 Bellow, Saul, 31-32 Benford, Gregory, 16, 22n, 76-77, 81, 91,92 Benny, Jack, 32 Berry, Rick, 93 Berryman, John, 28, 34 "Dream Song," 34 Berserker series (Saberhagen), 146 Bester, Alfred, 28, 98 Stars My Destination, The, 28 Better Homes and Gardens, 95 Bettleheim, Bruno, 59 Big Town, 30 Birch, Helen, 74 Bishop, Michael, 81 Bisson, Terry, 92 Blackmur, R. D., 32, 34 Blade Runner, 29 Blake, William, 29, 145 Blake's 7, A^n Blaylock, James, 130 Blish, James, 81, 90-91 "Blood's a Rover" (Oliver), 30 Bloom, Harold, 27, 32, 34 Blumlein, Michael, 81, 82-83 Body of Glass. See He, She, and It Bork, Robert, 104 Boston, Bruce, 4, 141-48 Stained Glass Rain, 141-48 Brackett, Leigh, 127-28 Bradbury, Ray, 80, 82 Bradley, James, 23n Bradley, Marion Zimmer, 38, 43, 81 Brave New World (Huxley), 29, 74 Brin, David, 18-19, 149n "Piecework," 18-19 Brooke-Rose, Christine, 52, 60 Bryant, Edward, 81 Bull, Emma, 83 Bunch, David R., 81,98 Burke, Kenneth, 32, 34 Burroughs, Edgar Rice, 2 Burroughs, William, 31,91 Naked Lunch, 31

x

Burton, Robert, 22n Anatomy of Melancholy, The, 22n Buswell, Louis, 122, 123-24 "Clouds of Death," 122, 123-24 Butler, Octavia E., 4, 29, 81, 91, 128, 129-37 Adulthood Rites, 129-30 Dawn, 129-30 Imago, 129-30 Kindred, 129-30, 131, 133, 135 Mind of My Mind, 129 Parable of the Sower, 130, 135 Parable of the Talents, 130 Wild Seed, 129-30, 131 Xenogenesis trilogy, 129-30, 131-32 Cadigan, Pat, 71, 81, 82-83, 91, 160n Caesar, Julius, 106 Camera Obscura, 30 Camp Concentration (Disch), 90 Campbell, John W., Jr., 26, 68, 69, 1078, 141 "Canon Yeoman's Tale" (Chaucer), 16 Card, Orson Scott, 28, 81, 82, 84, 92 Ender's Game, 28 Carroll, Lewis, 54 Alice in Wonderland, 54, 56 Carter, Jimmy, 113 Cassidy, Jack, 32 Cawelti, John, 47n Cazotte, Jacques, 52-53 Cervantes, Miguel de, 27-28 Chandler, Raymond, 26 Charnas, Suzy McKee, 43, 48n, 49n Motherlines, 43, 48n Walk to the End of the World, 43, 49n Chaucer, Geoffrey, 16 "Canon Yeoman's Tale," 16 Cherryh, C. J., 83 Chesterton, G K., 28-29 Childhood's End (Clarke), 34-35 Children of Men, The (James), 74 Christian, Barbara, 128 Cioran, E. M., 33 Clancy, Tom, 146 Clark, Patrick, 93 Clarke, Arthur C, 19, 34-35, 68-69, 73, 74,82, 142, 146

173

Index Childhood's End, 34-35 Rendezvous with Rama, 146 "Sentinel, The," 146 2001: A Space Odyssey, 146 Cleese, John, 10 "Cloak of Anarchy" (Niven), 19 "Clouds of Death" (Buswell), 122, 12324 Clute, John, 72-74, 75 "Cold Equations, The" (Godwin), 20, 23n Comus (Milton), 10 Coney, Michael G, 81 Conklin, Groff, 30 Conn, Phoebe, 48n Tangled Hearts, 48n Count Zero (Gibson), 151 -60 Couper, Heather, 68, 76 Coupland, Douglas, 75 Crime and Punishment (Dostoyevsky), 89-90 Crowley, John, 60, 81 Little, Big, 60 Cry the Beloved Country) (Paton), 90 Csicsery-Ronay, Istvan, Jr., 97-98 Curie, Marie, 84 Dann, Jack, 93 Darwin, Charles, 11, 15, 22n Datlow, Ellen, 92 Davidson, Avram, 81 Davis, Angela, 131 Davis, Miles, 35 Dawn (Butler), 129-30 Delany, Samuel R., 45-46, 70, 80-81, 85,90,92,98, 112 Nova, 112 Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, 70, 71 Triton, 112 del Rey, Lester, 44-45 "Helen O'Loy," 44-45, 47 De Man, Paul, 29 Derrida, Jacques, 29 Dick, Philip K., 2, 81,84,90,99 Dickens, Charles, 140 Disch, Thomas M., 80, 82 Camp Concentration, 90 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Stevenson),

22n Dorsey, Candas Jane, 81 DosPassos, John, 91 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 26 Crime and Punishment, 89-90 Douglas, Mary, 112

Dore, Gustave, 32

Dragnet, 30 Dragonworld series (McCaffrey), 58-59 "Dream Song" (Berryman), 34 Dreaming in Smoke (Sullivan), 69 Drowning Towers. See Sea and Summer, The Dumas, Alexander, 58 Three Musketeers, The, 58 Eagleton, Terry, 76 Edge Detector, 93 Elgin, Suzette Haden, 81, 82-83 Ellison, Harlan, 81 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 106-10, 114-16 Emshwiller, Carol, 81, 98, 128 Ender's Game (Card), 28 Erdrich, Louise, 128 Extrapolation, 95, 99, 100, 119 Faerie Queene, The (Spenser), 9 Fairyland (McAuley), 69 Felperin, Howard, 8, 13, 16 Ferret, 93 Feynman, Richard, 16, 23n Fiedler, Leslie, 47n Fielding, Henry, 109 Jonathan Wild, 109 Finch, Sheila, 7,21 n Fish, Stanley, 29 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 109 Great Gatsby, The, 109 "Flandry" series (Anderson), 14 Fleurs de Mai, Les (Baudelaire), 31 Footfall (Niven and Pournelle), 146 Foucault, Michel, 21, 30, 34, 112, 160n Foundation (Asimov), 17 Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction, 3, 76, 93, 95, 99, 100, 119 Fowler, Karen Joy, 70, 81,91 Sarah Canary, 70 Frankenstein (Shelley), 9, 19, 22n, 23n,

174 29 Franklin, Benjamin, 32 Franklin, H. Bruce, 16, 110, 111, 116, 123, 124 Frye, Northrop, 32, 34, 58 Fuck Science Fiction, 93 Gate to Women's Country, The (Tepper), 40 Genet, Jean, 91 Gernsback, Hugo, 26, 29, 68, 159-60 Gibson, William, 2, 7, 29, 68, 81, 91, 92, 140,151-60, 160n Count Zero, 151-60 Neuromancer, 29, 34, 68 Gigi, 30 Gilgamesh, 28 Glancy, Diane, 80, 81,82 Gloss, Molly, 80, 81,82-83 "God Who Slept with Women, The" (Aldiss), 47-48n Godwin, Tom, 23n "Cold Equations, The," 20, 23n Golding, William, 84 Goldsmith, Maurice, 69 Goldstein, Lisa, 81 Gomez, Jewelle, 128 Goonan, Kathleen Ann, 91 Gotlieb, Phyllis, 81 Grant, Glenn, 93 Gravity's Rainbow (Pynchon), 29 Great Gatsby, The (Fitzgerald), 109 Green Day, 20 Greenblatt, Stephen, 14-15 Greene, Graham, 32 Greenland, Colin, 69, 71,72 Take Back Plenty, 69 Gross, Martha, 48n One Kiss, 48n Gulliver's Travels (Swift), 12, 15, 71 Gunn, Eileen, 81 Haldeman, Joe, 81 Hamann, Brad, 93 Hammerstein, Oscar, II, 31 Hand, Elizabeth, 91 Handmaid's Tale, The (Atwood), 30, 70-71 Harding, Tonya, 25

Index Hawking, Stephen, 76 Hay, George, 69 He, She, and It (Piercy), 44-45, 46-47, 48n, 71-74 Heatseeker (Shirley), 90 Heinlein, Robert A., 4, 14, 30, 34, 4546,58,80,82,84,90, 104, 106-16 "Man Who Sold the Moon, The," 104,106-16 Man Who Sold the Moon, The, 107 "Requiem," 109-10, 111 Starship Troopers, 90 Stranger in a Strange Land, 30 Time Enough for Love, 58 "Helen O'Loy" (del Rey), 44-45, 47 Helprin, Mark, 60 Winter's Tale, 60 Hemingway, Ernest, 141 Henderson, Zenna, 81 Hendrix, Howard V., 20-21 Hess, Sonya Dorman, 80, 81, 82-83 Hobbes, Thomas, 140 Hodges, A. L., 124 "Astounding Announcement, An," 124 Hogan, James P., 140 Hoggart, Richard, 75-76 "Hole Man, The" (Niven), 81 Hollinger, Veronica, 97-98 Homer, 9, 11, 12, 13, 145, 146 Iliad, The,2>\ Odyssey, The, 9,31, 145, 146 Homer, Steve, 67 Hopkins, Gerard Manly, 33 Horace, 9-10 Howarth, Matt, 93 Hubbard, L. Ron, 17 Hume, Kathryn, 57-59 Huntington, John, 7-8, 13 Huxley, Aldous, 20, 29 Brave New World, 29 Huxley, Thomas, 15, 22n Iliad, The (Homer), 30 Imago (Butler), 129 In the Days of the Comet (Wells), 29 In the Mother's Land (Vonarburg), 40, 43 Independent, 67, 68, 74

Index Independent on Sunday, 67, 74 Ing, Dean, 140 Inner Sanctum, 30 Interference on the Brain Screen, 93 Interzone, 18,72,74,93 "Invisible Bomber, The" (Pease), 124 Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, 93 Island of Dr. Moreau, The (Wells), 9-15 Islands in the Net (Sterling), 104, 111 -16 Jackson, Rosemary, 52, 56-57, 60 Jakubowski, Maxim, 70, 71 James, Henry, 34, 53 Turn of the Screw, The, 53, 58 James, P. D., 74 Children of Men, The, 74 Jameson, Fredric, 8, 29 Jesus, 17 Johnson, Magic, 34 Jonathan Wild (Fielding), 109 Joseph, 17-18 Joyce, James, 144-45, 146 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A, 144 Ulysses, 144-45, 146 Junor, John, 68 Jurassic Park, 76 Kafka, Franz, 91 Keller, Donald, 142-43 Kelly, James Patrick, 81, 82-83 Kerr, Philip, 74 Kessel, John, 81,91 Kessler, Carol Farley, 47n Kincaid, Paul, 73 Kindred (Butler), 129-30, 131, 133, 135 King Lear (Shakespeare), 34 Kingsley, Charles, 56 Kingston, Maxine Hong, 128 Kipling, Rudyard, 13 "Man Who Would Be King, The," 13 Knight, Damon, 81 Kooistra, Jeffrey, 39 Kornbluth, C M , 90-91 Krantz, Judith, 90 Kress, Nancy, 81,91

175 Lacan, Jacques, 144 Lackey, Mercedes, 48n Lafferty, R. A, 81,98 Lamont, Norman, 68 "Land Ironclads, The" (Wells), 18-19 Langford, Larry, 139 Latham, Rob, 97 Lawrence, Raymond Emery, 122 "Posterity Fund, The," 122 Lawrence, T. E, 115 Leavis, F. R, 75-76 Le Guin, Ursula K, 2, 73, 80-81, 82, 83, 84,99,103,127-29, 130,140 Norton Book of Science Fiction, The (with Attebery), 2, 3, 79-84, 103 Leiber, Fritz, 81,82, 84 Leinster, Murray, 122, 123 "Politics," 122, 123 Lem, Stanislaw, 2, 99 Lessing, Doris, 20, 73, 84, 139 Letterman, David, 93 Lewis, C . S , 20, 51, 68 Narnia series, 51 Lewis, Jerry Lee, 31 Lieder, Rick, 93 Life of Brian, The, 10 Limp Biskit, 20 Little, Big (Crowley), 60 Lively, Adam, 74 Locus, 82, 92, 93 Lolita (Nabokov), 31 Lord of the Flies (Golding), 13 Lord of the Rings, The (Tolkien), 58-60 Lucifer's Hammer (Niven and Pournelle), 146 McAuley, Paul J, 19,69 Fairyland, 69 Macbeth (Shakespeare), 28 McCaffery, Larry, 132 McCaffrey, Anne, 58-59, 128 Dragonworld series, 58-59 MacCarthy, Cormac, 90 Mclntyre, VondaN, 81 MacKinnon, Catherine, 37 MacLean, Katherine, 81, 82, 84 Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, The, 93

176 Mailer, Norman, 31-32 Major, John, 75 Malcolm X, 32

Malzberg, Barry N , 81 "Man Who Sold the Moon, The" (Heinlein), 104, 106-16 Man Who Sold the Moon, The (Heinlein), 107 "Man Who Would Be King, The" (Kipling), 13 Martin Kane, Private Investigator, 30 Maupassant, Guy de, 52-53 May, Julian, 58-59, 86 Saga of the Exiles, the, 58-59 Merril, Judith, 30, 84 Mieville, China, 69 Perdido Street Station, 69 Mighty Diamonds, 105 Miller, J.Hillis, 32, 33 Miller, Joseph D , 23n Milton, John, 10, 11, 13, 148 Comus, 10 Paradise Lost, 32, 148 Mind of My Mind (Butler), 129 Miracle on 34th Street, 82 Misha, 4, 129, 130, 133-37 Red Spider White Web, 130, 133-37 Mixson, Laura, 83 Modern Language Association, 8, 9, 15, 16,26 Moorcock, Michael, 75, 90 Moore, C.L, 127-28 More, Thomas, 58 Utopia, 58 Morgan, Rowland, 75 Morrison, Toni, 128 Morrissey, Pat, 129 Moses, 34, 111 Motherlines (Charnas), 43, 48n Murphy, Pat, 81,91 Naked Lunch (Burroughs), 31 Narnia series (Lewis), 51 NESFA Index to Short Science Fiction, 82,83 Neuromancer (Gibson), 29, 34, 68 "Neutron Star" (Niven), 81 New York Review of Science Fiction, The, 23n, 93, 142-43

Index Nietzsche, Friedrich, 27 Nineteen Eighty-Four (Orwell), 71, 74 Niven, Larry, 14, 19,81,82, 146 "Cloak of Anarchy," 19 Footfall (with Pournelle), 146 "Hole Man, The," 81 Lucifer's Hammer (with Pournelle), 146 "Neutron Star," 81 Non-Stop Magazine, 93 Noon, Jeff, 69, 74 Vurt, 69 Norton, Andre, 127-28 Norton Book of Science Fiction, The (Le Guin and Attebery), 2, 3, 79-84, 9899,103 Nova (Delany), 112 Odyssey, The (Homer), 9, 31, 145, 146 Oedipus Rex (Sophocles), 26 Oliver, Chad, 30 "Blood's a Rover," 30 One Kiss (Gross), 48n Orwell, George, 20, 67 Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1\,1A Outworld Cats (Lovejoy), 27 Oxford Book of Fantasy Stories, The (Shippey), 3 Oxford Book of Science Fiction Stories, The (Shippey), 3, 18-19 Oxford English Dictionary, 82, 83 O-Zone (Theroux), 72 Parable of the Sower (Butler), 130, 135 Parable of the Talents (Butler), 130 Paradise Lost (Milton), 32, 148 Parker, Charlie, 31 Parzival (von Eschenbach), 35 Pease, John, 124 "Invisible Bomber, The," 124 People, 95 Perdido Street Station (Mieville), 69 Philmus, Robert, 9-10, 22n Picture of Dorian Gray, The (Wilde), 27 "Piecework" (Brin), 18-19 Piercy, Marge, 44-45, 48n, 71-75 He, She, and It, 44-45, 46-47, 48n, 71-74 Woman on the Edge of Time, 74

Index Planet Stories, 30 Platt, Charles, 92 Pohl, Frederik, 30, 81 "Politics" (Leinster), 122, 123 Pollack, Rachel, 71 Pope, Alexander, 29-30 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A (Joyce), 144 Positronic Man, The (Asimov and Silverberg), 44, 45 "Posterity Fund, The" (Lawrence), 122 Potter, J. K., 93 Pournelle, Jerry, 14, 146 Footfall (with Niven), 146 Lucifer's Hammer (with Niven), 146 "Power" (Vincent), 121 Pratchett, Terry, 76 Prelude, The (Wordsworth), 31 Preuss, Paul, 81,82, 84 Price, Vincent, 91 Pride and Prejudice (Austen), 42 Profumo, David, 74 Propp, Vladimir, 17 Pros, The, 48n Proud Flesh, 93 Pynchon, Thomas, 29, 31-32, 91 Gravity's Rainbow, 29 Queen, Ellery, 26, 30 Rabkin, Eric S., 51-52, 54-55, 56, 63 Reagan, Ronald, 132 Red Mars (Robinson), 47n, 73 Red Spider White Web (Misha), 130, 133-37 Rendezvous with Rama (Clarke), 146 "Requiem" (Heinlein), 109, 111 Resnick, Michael, 81 Rhodes, Cecil, 110, 111 Ricardo, David, 140 Roberts, Robin, 37, 47n Robinson, Kim Stanley, 47n, 73, 81, 91, 92 Red Mars, Mw, 73 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), 13 Rodgers, Richard, 31 Rogers, Ginger, 27 Rouse, A. L., 31 Rucker, Rudy, 91,92

111 Russ, Joanna, 80, 81, 82-83, 98, 130, 137n Ryman, Geoff, 71 Saberhagen, Fred, 146 Berserker series, 146 Saga of the Exiles, The (May), 58-59 Said, Edward, 105 Samuelson, David N., 97-98 Sarah Canary (Fowler), 70 Sargent, Pamela, 39, 43, 49n, 81, 82 Shore of Women, The, 43 Saturday Evening Post, The, 16 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 33 Schmitz, James H., 19, 81, 82-83 Schwartzchild, Martin, 84 "Schwartzchild Radius" (Willis), 81 Science Fiction Eye, 3, 89-94 Science Fiction Story Index, 81 Science Fiction Studies, 3, 4, 95-100, 119 Sea and Summer, The (Turner), 71 "Sentinel, The" (Clarke), 146 Shakespeare, William, 27-28, 35 King Lear, 34 Macbeth, 28 Tempest, The, 13 Sheckley, Robert, 81,98 Sheldon, Alice. See Tiptree, James P., Jr. Shelley, Mary, 2, 9, 22n, 29 Frankenstein, 9, 22n, 23n, 29 Shepard, Lucius, 91, 92 Shiner, Lewis, 81,82, 84, 91,92 Shirley, John, 90, 91,92 Heatseeker, 90 Shore of Women, The (Sargent), 43 Silverberg, Robert, 44, 81, 98 Positronic Man, The (with Asimov), 44,45 Simak, Clifford D , 81, 82-83, 98 Simon, Myron, 108 Smith, Adam, 140 Smith, Cordwainer, 81,98 Smith, E. E. "Doc," 2 Sousa, John Philip, 31 Speller, Maureen, 73 Spenser, Edmund, 9 Faerie Queene, The, 9 Spillane, Mickey, 30-31

Index

178

128, 130 "Women Men Don't See, The," 43, 49n Todorov, Tzvetan, 17, 51, 52-56, 60 Toffler, Alvin, 111,112, 114, 116 Tolkien, J. R. R, 51, 52, 54, 55, 56-57, 58-60, 62 Lord of the Rings, The, 58-60 Triton (Delany), 112 Troyes, Chretien de, 58 Truman, Harry, 16 Turn of the Screw, The (James), 53, 58 Turner, George, 71 Sea and Summer, The, 11 Twain, Mark, 85 2001: A Space Odyssey, 29 2001: A Space Odyssey (Clarke), 146

Spinrad, Norman, 91 Stableford, Brian, 21-22n Stained Glass Rain (Boston), 141-48 Star Trek, 41, 48n, 68, 93-94, 97 Star Trek: The Next Generation, 45, 48n Star Trek: Voyager, 44 Star Wars, 93-94 Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (Delany), 70, 71 Stars My Destination, The (Bester), 28 Starship Troopers (Heinlein), 90 Starsky and Hutch, 48n Steffan, Dan, 91, 92 Steiner, George, 28 Sterling, Bruce, 4, 81, 90, 91, 104, 11216, 130, 159, 160n Islands in the Net, 104, 112-16 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 22n, 109, 111 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 22n Stewart, Patrick, 68 Stranger in a Strange Land (Heinlein), 30 Strete, Craig, 92 Strugatsky, Arkady and Boris, 98 Sturgeon, Theodore, 46, 81, 90-91, 98 Sullivan, Tricia, 69 Dreaming in Smoke, 69 Sunday Times, 67, 68 Suvin, Darko, 7, 21 n Swanwick, Michael, 81 Swift, Jonathan, 12, 13, 15 Gulliver's Travels, 12, 15, 71

van Vogt, A. E., 98 Varley,John, 81 Vector, 73 Vincent, Had, 121 "Power," 121 von Eschenbach, Wolfram, 35 Parzival, 35 Vonarburg, Elisabeth, 43 In the Mother's Land, 40, 43 Vonnegut, Kurt, Jr., 80, 82, 84, 140 Vurt (Noon), 69

Take Back Plenty (Greenland), 69 Tangled Hearts (Conn), 48n Tatsumi, Takayuki, 91-92 Taylor, Charles, 105-6, 107 Tempest, The (Shakespeare), 13 Tenn, William, 98 Terminator 2, 76 Theocritus, 17 Theroux, Paul, 72 O-Zone, 72 Three Musketeers, The (Dumas), 58 Time Enough for Love (Heinlein), 58 Time Machine, The (Wells), 11,35 Times, 67, 68 Times Literary Supplement, 76 Tiptree, James P., Jr., 19, 43, 49n, 81,

Waldrop, Howard, 81,92 Walk to the End of the World (Charnas), 43, 49n Walker, Alice, 128, 137n War of the Worlds, The (Wells), 14-15 Weave of Women, A (Broner), 40 Weiner, Andrew, 81 Wells, H. G, 2, 7, 9-15, 18-19, 29, 35 In the Days of the Comet, 29 Island of Dr. Moreau, The, 9-15 "Land Ironclads, The," 18-19 Time Machine, The, 11, 34-35 War of the Worlds, The, 14-15 When the Sleeper Wakes, 13 Westfahl, Gary, 97-98 When the Sleeper Wakes (Wells), 13

Ulysses (Joyce), 145, 146 Utopia (More), 58

Index White, Lesley, 75 White, Ted, 91 Wild Seed (Butler), 129-30, 131 Wilde, Oscar, 27-28, 31 Picture of Dorian Gray, The, 27 Wilhelm, Kate, 81 Williamson, Jack, 91 Willis, Connie, 81, 82, 84 "Schwartzchild Radius," 81 Wilson, Woodrow, 25, 120 Wilson Quarterly, The, 32 Wind in the Willows, The (Grahame), 90 Winter's Tale (Helprin), 60 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 33 Wizard of Oz, The (Baum), 58 Wolf, Susan, 107 Wolfe, Bernard, 98 Wolfe, Gene, 81 Womack, Jack, 92 Woman on the Edge of Time (Piercy), 74 "Women Men Don't See, The" (Tiptree), 43, 49n Wonder, Stevie, 31 Wordsworth, William, 31 Prelude, The, 31 Wright, Orville and Wilbur, 17 Xenogenesis trilogy (Butler), 129-30, 131-32 Zelazny, Roger, 81,82-83

179


About the Contributors STEPHEN P. BROWN edited Science Fiction Eye since its first issue until its hiatus, and he contributed an essay on cyberpunk to Larry McCaffery's critical anthology Storming the Reality Studio.

TOWNS END CARR has been a graduate student at the University of California, Riverside, researching representations of bi-sexuality in feminist science fiction and fantasy. JOSEPH CHILDERS, Associate Professor of English and Associate Dean at the University of California, Riverside, is the author of Novel Possibilities and co-author and general editor of The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism. B. EVANS, Professor of French at DePauw University, is managing editor and publisher of Science Fiction Studies, general editor of Wesleyan University Press's new series "Early Classics of Science Fiction," and author of the awardwinning critical study Jules Verne Rediscovered. ARTHUR

Associate Professor of English and Director of Women's Studies at Middle Tennessee State University, is co-editor of Enterprise Zones, editor of Fantasy Girls, and author of articles and book chapters on representations of gender, race, and feminism in science fiction literature, television, and film. ELYCE RAE HELFORD,

HOWARD V. HENDRIX is the author of the novels Lightpaths, Standing Wave, Better Angels, and Empty Cities of the Full Moon, as well as the scholarly study The Ecstasy of Catastrophe. He has authored some three dozen short stories and about an equal number of critical articles and book reviews. EDWARD JAMES, Professor of Medieval History at the University of Reading, edited Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction from 1986 to 2001, is the author of Science Fiction in the 20th Century, and is the co-editor of the Hugonominated Terry Pratchett: Gulity of Literature.

182

About the Contributors

SUSAN KRAY, Associate Professor of Communication at Indiana State University, Terre Haute, earned her Ph.D. in the Institute of Communication Research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and her Master of Professional Writing degree at the University of Southern California. Her current research centers on science fiction film and on sociological perspectives on the motion picture industry. JONATHAN LANGFORD is a former graduate student in the English program at the University of California, Riverside who now works as a freelance writer in the field of educational technology.

late Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, was the author of six books on literature, including The Science Fiction of H. G. Wells, numerous essays and reviews in critical anthologies and magazines, and four detective novels. Additionally, he served on the Pulitzer Prize Fiction Jury, three times as chair. FRANK MCCONNELL,

REGNA MEENK, formerly in academia, has been assimilated by the Borg and is currently creating relationships between technology, science fiction, film, memory, marketing and architecture from within the Microsoft Corporation. lectures in American History at the University of Middlesex. She has published articles in Extrapolation and Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction, is now Editor of Foundation, and with Edward James is editing The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction. FARAH MENDLESOHN

D. MILLER is a neurophysiologist and neuropharmacologist now part of the faculty of the University of Southern California. He is also an ex-Project Director for the Space Shuttle program and a long-time science fiction critic. JOSEPH

TOM SHIPPEY is Walter J. Ong Chair of Humanities at Saint Louis University. He edited The Oxford Book of Science Fiction Stories and The Oxford Book of Fantasy Stories, and co-edited the critical anthology Fiction 2000: Cyberpunk and the Future of Narrative. GEORGE SLUSSER, Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California at Riverside, has written several books on science fiction authors and coedited numerous volumes of critical essays. In 1986, he received the Pilgrim Award for his lifetime contributions to the field. GARY WESTFAHL, who teaches at the University of California at Riverside, is the author of four books, including Cosmic Engineers and Science Fiction, Children's Literature, and Popular Culture, and numerous articles on science fiction and fantasy. He writes a bimonthly column for the science fiction magazine Interzone.

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