Science Fiction, Ghosts, and Detectives - a genre mumble

[steepholm]

‘[Ballard’s] fabulistic style led people to review his work as science fiction. But that's like calling Brave New World science fiction, or 1984.' Robert Weil, Ballard's editor at Norton.

This kind of statement frequently causes snorts of scorn and outrage (one nostril apiece) amongst the SF community, as any reader of Ansible – from where this was drawn – will know. And it’s easy to see why, especially when it is authors who write SF that make it, Margaret Atwood being the most notorious. I think the outrage is justified, on three related grounds:

1. Ingratitude: these writers are biting the hand that feeds them. We all know how sharp that tooth can be.
2. Taking credit where its not due. What could be more galling that to watch a novelist being congratulated on their originality in the literary press, for using an idea that has been part of the SF landscape for decades – and then to hear both congratulater and congratulate dismiss SF as a farrago of flying squids and ray guns?
3. The sheer illogicality of making a special pleading argument that goes like this:

All SF is bad

But look at this example of SF! It’s well written, has deep characterization, is philosophically provocative, etc., and has all the qualities you profess to admire!

I agree that this is a good book. And for that reason I deny that it’s SF at all. As I said, all SF is bad.

I don’t consider myself an SFianado at all, but of course I get irritated by all this too, in sympathy. But I want to get a little beyond irritation, and ask whether there’s anything more substantial behind these arguments?

More under the cut

I’m prompted to ask by two things. One is a letter to the latest Ansible from Fred Lerner, provoked by the quotation above:

It depends upon how you define "science fiction". If your approach is thematic, or based on narrative strategy, then of course most of Ballard -- as well as Brave New World and 1984 -- are science fiction. But if you use the definition-by-provenance approach -- "science fiction is that body of literature produced within the science fiction community" -- then Brave New World and 1984 would be excluded. You may have read my arguments for that approach to definition in Lofgeornost (or in "A Bookman's Fantasy"); I'll just say here that there are a lot of things that can meaningfully be said about the literature that Our Gang produces that isn't applicable to Huxley and Orwell.

Now, I haven’t read Lerner’s article (maybe others have?), but in this abbreviated form it seems like a circular version of the special pleading argument mentioned above: if you decide in advance that Ballard isn’t part of the ‘science fiction community’ then what he writes won’t be science fiction. But how do you decide that? What does ‘science fiction community’ actually mean? If there’s more to this argument, I’d be interested to hear it.

That was as far as I’d got until I heard John Sutherland on Radio 4 this morning, talking about ghost stories. He was arguing for their importance and longevity. After all, Hamlet and Wuthering Heights are ghost stories, he pointed out. And I found myself starting to say to the kettle (for I was making coffee at the time) – yes, well, they’re stories with ghosts, and the ghosts are pretty important, but it seems kind of misleading to call them ghost stories in the way that you might call ‘Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to Ye, My Lad’ or The Woman in Black ghost stories.

Hang on, hissed the kettle – aren’t you making exactly the same move you deplore in those who say that Brave New World isn’t SF?

Well – am I being snotty? To be honest, I don’t know. I’ve been trying to see if I can find any respectable arguments to give my gut instinct a more attractive gloss. It’s not a matter of canonicity or quality, anyway: I’d have no hesitation in calling A Christmas Carol a ghost story, and that’s pretty darn canonical. I’d be fairly happy to call Beloved a ghost story too – and that's a great novel by any standards. (I love M. R. James too, for that matter.)

So, what’s going on? Thinking about it, I can see that I’d also be happier to call Hamlet a ghost story than Macbeth, and happier to call Macbeth a ghost story than Richard III or Julius Caesar, though ghosts appear in all of them. Why so? Is it to do with the centrality of the ghosts? Or the function they fulfil? My first thought was that there might be a distinction between ghosts as external, unambiguously supernatural beings (as M. R. James’ all are), and ghosts as possibly projections of a human character’s conscience or fears – a subtlety perhaps more likely to win literary respect from our psychologically-interested age. But the latter interpretation applies as much to Richard III and Julius Caesar as to the governess in The Turn of the Screw or to Scrooge, so that doesn’t really wash.

To widen my confusion, I’m also asking myself questions such as: can a poem of fourteen lines not be a sonnet? Can a story about a detective solving a murder not be a detective story? Will we hear (or do we already hear) pundits say things like, ‘People often call P.D. James a writer of detective fiction, but that would be like calling Poe, or Wilkie Collins, a writer of detective fiction!’ And would they have a point? (The answer to that one is ‘No’. Actually, perhaps the strange thing is that I haven't heard anyone say this.) What about a book in which a librarian tracks down a borrower who has failed to pay two years’ of fines, and brings him to book? Is that a detective story? Or a librarian story? Or a stalker story...?

I definitely need more coffee.

Comments

[shark-hat.livejournal.com]

I think you can sort-of see a science fiction community of authors; the ones who go to cons, or read each others' work and respond to its arguments or pull out themes from it (so, say, there might have been a "Singularity SF" community for the last 10 years or so) or at least agree they're writing SF. Though since Ballard had stories in Interzone I think it'd still be bloody difficult to say he wasn't writing in an SF community of some sort!

But I don't think that means something written by an author who doesn't hang around with other SF authors can't be SF. I mean, 1984 was set in the future, it's about the effects that a technologically and socially different society have on a person within it- it's quite Le Guin-ish, except bleaker- and it's infulenced later SF dystopias. Saying that "literary" is the One True Way to consider it would seem daft.
(If Atwood acknowledged that she does bloody well write spec-fic and met some other authors doing similar stuff, her SFnal elements might be better and less reinventing of boring old wheels. But that's a whole nother snark.)

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

As calimac points out below, I was a bit confused about Lerner, who wasn't excluding Ballard but Huxley and Orwell. I'm still not entirely convinced that what Lerner's talking about is the best way to define the genre, though, even if it's interesting in its own right.

[deborah]

I think it can also get problematic when you start defining genre by community. Goodness knows I've done in my own writing, with regards to writing about fan fiction and talking about how much fan fiction is written in a community which, as both shark_hat and calimac point out in regards to science fiction, has fiction that is responsive and inter-textual. But at the same time, a lot of problems pop up when you start defining "who is involved" by "who I THINK is involved." A lot of the conversations around several of the more recent rounds of race kerfuffle, for example, eventually came down to authors and other professionals in the science fiction and fantasy community saying "but into the advent of the Internet I hadn't seen you in MY cons or talked to you on MY mailing lists were seen you writing letters in MY newsletters, so clearly you aren't part of the community, right?"

Community is a very fluffy thing with porous boundaries.

[shark-hat.livejournal.com]

Yes, I think I was just thinking about steepholm's question "What does 'science fiction community' actually mean?" and poking with a stick until I got "... writers who act as if they're in a community?", but not thinking about "wait, a science fiction community?"
Cloudy edges trailing off, thinning out, merging into the next fogbank of magical realism or horror or... much better than hard lines with in-ness and out-ness.
(And then an aeroplane comes swooping through from nowhere, zooming straight through the clouds and leaveing vapour trails you can see for hundreds of miles!)

[calimac.livejournal.com]

The problem is that the SF community has fractured in recent decades, due to huge size. Not to be confused with rifts within one community caused by differences of opinion (which date back past the New Wave/Old Wave rift of the 60s to the Exclusion Wars of the late 1930s), but there was never any question in those days as to where the borders of the community were. If you got published in the SF magazines regularly, you got sucked in, even if you never went to cons. See Julie Phillips' biography of Alice Sheldon for an example of how it happened even to the most reclusive.