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

[calimac.livejournal.com]

This is the kind of fascinating post I expect to see from you.

In wondering if Fred Lerner's definition is circular, I think you're missing something. This is his argument, schematically:

Thematic: Huxley, Orwell, Ballard all IN

Provenance: Huxley and Orwell OUT; Ballard IN

You seemed to be wondering on what grounds Fred would exclude Ballard from "the SF community," but he is in fact not doing so. The "SF community" can be roughly defined as "that group of people who know what you're talking about when you say 'the SF community' in Ansible." From the point of view of writing SF, the SF community includes those writers who are aware that what they're writing is SF, who write for SF markets, and who, most importantly, are writing their work in awareness of, response to, and conversation with the body of self-aware SF that has come before them. Many SF critics, Justine Larbalestier among them, have noted that classic SF magazine stories are not meant to be read in isolation, but as part of a huge conversation and exchange going on in the pages of the magazines.

Ballard was part of that conversation and that community (and he cheerfully acknowledged this), which makes him SF by that definition.

Fred's article, which I have, basically distinguishes between those who can collectively create the definition of SF - writers, editors, publishers, even readers whose tastes in what to write, publish, and buy shape what is happening in the field - and those who should only be observing the definition - critics, historians, bibliographers - whose attempts to impose any strongly idiosyncratic definition of SF on their work would be arbitrary and basically useless to anyone but themselves.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the summary of the article, which is very interesting. Also, you're quite right - I meant to write 'Huxley' rather than 'Ballard' as being an example of someone Lerner would exclude from the SF community. I'll fix that in a minute.

This leaves me a with a couple of questions, which I'd be interested to know whether Lerner (or you) can answer. First, what about the founding writers of SF, who were writing before an SF community in the sense you describe it really existed? Does Jules Verne count as SF? Wells? (Any definition of SF that excluded these would pretty much rule itself out of court, I'd have thought.) Second, is SF a genre sui generis in this regard, or would Lerner apply analogous definition to detective fiction, romance, YA fantasy, etc? And if not, why not? Is there something about SF that makes it more communal in nature than other genres?

[calimac.livejournal.com]

I don't have any problem with defining the community as excluding Huxley. He was not part of that conversation; he was coming in to the topics from outside, as was Orwell. Once he said what he had to say, however, it was deemed relevant by the community, which is why he, like Orwell, has been designated as SF and retroactively incorporated into that conversation.

This fact offers a clue as to how to deal with founding fathers (Verne, Wells; Poe, Collins, Conan Doyle). You can treat them two ways. One is to say that they started the conversation; that the early SF or mystery writers were responding to and in conversation with them, even though the conversation was mostly only one-way. (I have no idea what Wells or Doyle thought of the genres that were firmly crystallizing while they were still alive. They might well have been as horrified as Tolkien was at some of what was starting to crystallize around him.)

The other way is to exclude them entirely, and say they're not part of this group. This may seem to you perverse, but it's useful to keep in mind what seems to be missed by all the commenters who consider Fred Lerner's idea to be self-evidently absurd. Fred's provenance-based approach is not really intended as a definition of SF. It is, in his own words, intending to group together a body of work about which certain things may meaningfully be said.

This can be demonstrated clearly with detective fiction, in considering the "rules" I mentioned in an earlier comment. You can talk about how the rules are employed in the body of provenance-based detective fiction, but you can't talk about their use by Conan Doyle, because he doesn't use them. You can only bring him in by contrast, or in a historical consideration of how the rules evolved. There is a coherent body of work that his is not part of. That doesn't mean he's not a detective story writer - as I wrote, nobody is more central to that canon than he - but it does mean he's not part of this conversation.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Fred's provenance-based approach is not really intended as a definition of SF. It is, in his own words, intending to group together a body of work about which certain things may meaningfully be said.

In the Ansible letter I quoted in my post he does explicitly offer it as a way of defining the genre; but I can definitely see the utility of that way of grouping work and writers, in the way that you say.

[calimac.livejournal.com]

In my reading of the letter he's not endorsing it as a definition of SF, still less as the definition. He's just saying that it can be done, and that it has its uses as defining a body of work for the purposes of talking about it.

[calimac.livejournal.com]

Is it OK with you if I write to Fred Lerner and alert him that we're having this conversation? I'm taking a lot of liberties in assuming I know what he means, which I'm doing because he and I are part of the same community, q.e.d.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Certainly - he'd be more than welcome.

[calimac.livejournal.com]

Good news: Fred Lerner has now put his original article on the web.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the pointer! I've read it once, and will do so again at greater leisure. At first blush I think that the letter to Ansible extrapolates from the essay, and you've extrapolated from the letter, but all in ways that are perfectly legitimate and in the spirit of the thing, as it were. I guess this line - "How one defines it depends on what one intends to do with it" - comes as close to summing it up as a single line could, and its pragmatism is appealing to me.

Applying that thought to the quotation at the top of my post, it's clear that what Robert Weil "intended to do" with his implicit definition was to set up a hierarchy of works and writers, with Ballard safely ensconced in the upper tier, and free of what Weil obviously regards as the taint of SF. In that context it seems to me a dishonest argument. That's not to say that similar arguments might not be used by others in better faith, and for worthier purposes.

[calimac.livejournal.com]

I was definitely extrapolating from the letter. I felt justified in doing so because, in contrast to some of your commenters who were incredulous at Fred's point, it seemed intuitively obvious to me once he made it. I'm part of his community; I have that background and see (so far as I can tell) the same way.

What made Weil's comment so silly was both that he had no idea that Orwell and Huxley could be classified as SF, and that he had no idea Ballard actually belonged to the SF milieu that he was looking down on.

Two side points:

1) While Ballard remained, all his life, pleased to acknowledge his membership in the SF community, and the same is true of most authors who came from it and acquired mainstream-lit reputations, there are some exceptions - authors who tried to pretend they never had any connection with that yukky stuff. Kurt Vonnegut was one.

2) A similar mistaken differentiation exists within the SF community itself. There was shock and dismay in some SF-reading quarters when highly-regarded "lit'ry" SF author Vonda N. McIntyre (the kind of author that Robert Weil has no idea exist) undertook Star Trek novels. How declasse! What they didn't know was that Vonda had been a Trekkie since before she ever published any fiction.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Aha - I see you were answering my questions even as I was asking them!

[deborah]

It's so interesting that this definition of community never comes up in the children's lit world. When J. K. Rowling claimed that she'd never read children's literature, nobody to be taken seriously* said that her books were not part of children's fantasy as a genre. In fact the general response from the children's literature world was not to say "she is an outsider" but ranged from the very negative "she is lying" to the more generous "she is mistaken about how many of the tropes of children's fantasy fiction she has absorbed by living in the world". But when her books followed the tropes of the genre and seemed in many ways to be in conversation with the rest of the genre, they were taken by people knowledgeable in the genre to be part of the genre.


*I admit that there were the usual stupid journalists saying things like "well, since nobody has written any children's fantasy since CS Lewis, JK Rowling has completely changed the world!" But stupid journalists will be stupid in any field. They would have said the same thing even had Rowling said "Diana Wynne Jones is my favorite author".