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

[deborah]

cqs says that he dislikes fantasy and loves science fiction, therefore book that he loves are science fiction, QED. This leads to much hilarity when he is defining, I don't know, The Curse of Chalion as science fiction.

More seriously, I think there are two things going on. One is the (I think) bogus question of quality. All science fiction is bad so George Orwell didn't write science fiction. All anime is bad so Miyazaki doesn't make anime. All romance is bad so Georgette Heyer and Jenny Crusie haven't written romances. All children's literature is simplistic so Scott Westerfeld books are incorrectly marketed to children.

At best, this argument shows a massive ignorance of the field about which one is speaking. At worst, it shows an incredible snobbery. "I don't want to admit to being one of those people, the ones I denigrate and mock for their plebeian reading/viewing/listening tastes, so I have to explain how the thing I like is different from the things they like." I certainly admit that I've done it myself, and as I've gotten older I've come to understand that what actually is going on is more a matter of exposure and crossover appeal. Anime happens not to be a genre which appeals to me, but Miyazaki makes movies which have enough crossover appeal with genres which do appeal to me that their high quality is accessible to me in a way that high-quality anime movies without that crossover appeal are not.

But there is a secondary question of genre. Genre tropes are more substantial than just "contains ghosts", or "contains a love story". When I claim that Anansi Boys reads to me as young adult, clearly I was recognizing something in the story structure and writing style, because the book doesn't even have an adolescent hero. There's a reason that the m/m erotic original fiction written by both amateurs and professionals who are on the periphery of the fanfic slash community is often called "original slash" instead of "gay erotica"; it follows the genre conventions of a different group of stories.

But the "good books aren't science fiction" crowd fall down under this definition as well. Handmaid's Tale, 1984, Brave New World, Never Let Me Go: all of these books absolutely follow the conventions of science fiction. Some of them have crossover appeal and crossover genre, I admit. Handmaid's Tale certainly also follows the genre conventions of feminist fiction, for example. But each of these stories has the character types, the reveal structure, the thematic structure, the narrative pattern, and basically the entire New Critical toolbox of science fiction patterns.

Hamlet, on the other hand, doesn't do this. There's a structure to a ghost story, and we all know it. For one thing, a ghost story is intended to frighten the listener into their particular way. And ghost story is ultimately about the ghost in a way that neither Hamlet and Macbeth is. They're not entirely absent of those ghost story conventions. For example, the ghost leads Hamlet into tragedies he wouldn't necessarily have found for himself, and Macbeth is arguably living in a ghost story although the story we are watching is not the ghost story he is living. This isn't a question about quality or some untouchable genre-free purity of Shakespeare. They could be absolutely terrible plays and their stories would still not be ghost stories.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Thanks for that: I think you're pretty much right, all the way down the line. I shall of course have to go away and see if I can pick it apart all the same, though.

[diceytillerman.livejournal.com]

Everything I was going to say has just been said more eloquently by gnomicutterance, from the cqs formula to children's lit being slammed regularly by random idiots saying the [rare] ones they like shouldn't be marketed as CHL. Whee!