A Short Comment on the Genre and Subculture of Science Fiction in the Wake of George R.R. Martin's Worldcon Comments

            The recent controversy around toastmaster George R.R. Martin’s repeated lauding of controversial editor and author John Campbell has produced a renewal of the ‘canon’ controversy. Most folks who I have seen respond to this have taken a fairly sensible approach. There’s no particular need to have read any particular set of science fictional texts to be a ‘fan’ of the genre. It’s hard to argue with the logic, particularly at a moment where one can spend a lifetime exploring a particular aspect of the genre, whether that be military science fiction, space opera or feminist science fiction. The textual production of the genre is so extensive that you are inevitably not going to have read some particular text that falls into some community’s ‘canon’, whether that is Robert Heinlein, Philip K. Dick, Joanna Russ, Octavia Butler, or any number of significant figures.

            In a sense, one could very easily stop at that moment of critique. It pretty effectively neutralizes the demand, but I want to explore a different level of the assumptions embedded in the claim of canonicity and the demand that one must read a set of subcultural figures to establish your authenticity of a fan. This obvious act of gatekeeping contains an important set of assumptions that the circle of fandom is somehow coextensive with the circle of science fiction and fantasy, or at least that it should play some significant and outsized role in defining science fiction. At this point, that illusion is fairly well shattered. We live in a world where thinly veiled slash fiction is sold at Target and figures such as George R.R. Martin and J.R.R. Tolkien are multi-million-dollar industries. Figures such as Philip K Dick and Octavia Butler are parts of significant academic conversations that only have tangential connections to fandom at best as well. At this point, their cultural relevance is no longer controlled by the subcultural fandom for better or for worse. The next book produced by George R.R. Martin is probably going to sell like hotcakes even if the most recent incidents cause the archipelago of the subculture to turn their backs on him.

            But I want to push that dimension further and argue that science fiction never was the sold domain of fandom. The genre has its origins before the creation of this subculture and it always exceeded the limits of the subculture. Hugo Gernsback may have given the genre its official name and he may have played a significant role in creating the subcultural community that celebrates that name, but the conventions of the genre were coagulating before his intervention and authors and publications had made their names in its construction before him. We can point back to a number of obvious names, Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, Mary Shelley, Edgar Allen Poe, and aspects of the utopian tradition. We can even point to a fairly significant pulp tradition that shapes the work of Gernsback and others. Most of these authors, who still define the literary conventions had no connection to the subculture or tangential connections at best, such as Wells’ frustration at the reprinting of his work by Gernsback without royalties. If one looks at the debates between Wells and Verne, one can see that they were able to debate the definition and limits of the genre without him. I don’t want to entirely dismiss the distinction between science fiction and the scientific romance or the fantastic voyage, but they are frequently less distinct than the disjunctures that exist within the subcultural world of science fiction itself, a world that includes Doc E.E. Smith, Isaac Asimov, Pamela Zoline, and Octavia Butler.

            Even when we move into the era of the 1930’s, 1940’s, and 1950’s, we can find significant works of science fiction that fall outside the narrow confines of fandom. The work of Karel Capek comes immediately to mind, along with the dissident works of Soviet critics such as Yevgeny Zamyatin and Mikhail Bulgakov. In addition, we can add to the list the works of Olaf Stapledon, George Orwell, and Katharine Burdekin. Within the United States, we can think of significant figures such as George Schuyler who has only recently been recognized as a significant science fiction writer and others. Through this massively incomplete list, we can see a world of science fictional narrative production that both falls largely outside the circles of the subgenre and that often plays a significant role in shaping the literary production of the subgenre, whether in the form of the word ‘robot’ introduced to the world by Capek or the dystopian conventions of 1984 and Brave New World. That continues with the work of authors such as Stanislav Lem, who was antagonistic to the subculture, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, and others. We can also include Margaret Atwood, who until recently has tried to distinguish her dystopian production from the genre and the subculture. Science fiction as a generic form has always exceeded the grasp of the science fiction subculture. It has never fully defined the readers of the texts and it has never defined the literary production of the genre. There are worlds of science fiction that don’t connect to that subculture or only tangentially connect to it.

            That isn’t to deny the real creativity and labor within the subculture. It has after all produced significant authors, modes of criticism, and very real communities. Members of the subculture have done a lot of the work to discover obscure texts that later define the conventions in the genre and have often done significant translation work. As maddening as it frequently is, it has created a rich language and a fascinating legacy. I can see why people want to preserve it and, in many cases, to break down the racialized and gendered walls of exclusion that often defined it. Within the latter context, decentering the narrative of fandom in the larger field of science fiction can play a productive role. Figures such as Campbell and Heinlein are significant within specific communities of literary production, but they don’t define the wider field of the genre. We can think of the ways that the subculture benefited from that larger world even as it frequently excluded it. We can track down other literary and historical narratives, which will be undoubtedly defined by their own flaws, contradictions, and promises. We can also follow paths of translation as subcultural narrative approaches are translated and transformed. The subculture has always played a part in this narrative, but it has never been the narrative in its entirety.

 

A Short Posting on The Handmaid's Tale

      I found myself thinking about Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale after a brief interaction at a talk at the recent Utopian Studies Conference last weekend. Like the last conference I attended, the conference went well and the panel focusing on feminist utopias and dystopias might have been my favorite panel of the conference. About half the papers of the final panel I attended focused on the novel and the recent HBO adaptation of the novel. The papers by Claire Curtis and Kate Meakin critically examined the adaptation and the way it diverged from the original material of the novel. In both cases, the presenters were critical of the adaptation and particularly its transformation of the originally white nationalist republic of Gilead into a more integrated if equally patriarchal construction. The second presenter, Kate Meakin, went further to explore the way that those troubling aspects of the tv series translated into the recent protests in support of women’s rights that appropriated the image of the Handmaid. She noted that it was particularly problematic to embrace the phrase, Make Margaret Atwood fiction again when the policies being protested had a long history in the oppression of women of color. Far from being a product of Margaret Atwood’s imagination, most of these policies had been enacted to restrict the reproductive rights of women of color, a point that Atwood herself makes in the novel itself.[1]

        In the comments section, I brought up the issue of the protests and noted that the protests tended to ignore the larger framing of the novel, one in which the Handmaids are in some sense relatively privileged in comparison to the women sent to deaths in the colonies or the African-American population who were almost certainly exterminated within the framework of the novel. The panelists were rightly critical of my poorly chosen framing of the analysis. Privilege is certainly the wrong word to use in conjunction of a population who must face the sort of intense domination and sexual violence that the Handmaids face, but the comment does gesture towards the nuanced manner that the fictional republic used to avoid the construction of a rebellion in the form of a ‘women as a class.’ The narrative marks the forms of resentment that create divisions between the Handmaids and the Marthas as well as the even wider gulfs between these figures and the various wives within the republic, who themselves are divided by class within the white republic. At the same time, those figures are incorporated within the republic even as they are systemically excluded from its public sphere distinguishing them from the women who are exiled to the colonies, the Jezebels on the margins of the society, and the populations exterminated by the regime.

       One of the most powerful aspects of the book is the way that the book explores this dense disciplinary network of surveillance through the interior voice of the Handmaid, Offred. As Atwood notes in her earlier comments on the novel, Offred isn’t a rebellious figure and is a figure that tries to survive in the society as it exists, even as she tries to find a way out of it. Atwood goes even farther, referring to the character as a ‘coward.’ As one of the panelists, Claire Curtis, noted, the desire to survive within the book and the show often comes at the expense of others. For my interpretation, the desire to survive also involves a need to engage with the rules set that is created by the Gilead Republic, an engagement that unavoidably involves a degree of internalization of those very rules. The figure of Offred becomes the vehicle to explore this deeply ambiguous mixture of a desire to escape, to rebel against the republic and at the same time, the perhaps even necessary complicity with that oppression both against herself and other populations.[2] The resentments over the small differences in the regime’s treatment of different groups of women and the slights from other women are richly represented in the figure. It also captures the way that the threat of exile or death becomes another way to get the wives, handmaids, and marthas to perform the role of enforcers of their own oppression.

       In this sense, the novel provides a much more thoroughly developed feminist analysis than I had previously given it credit. The Gilead Republic operates through a mixture of direct and indirect patriarchal sovereignty and, at the same time, the deployment of the techniques of sexuality that Foucault discusses in his first volume of The History of Sexuality. This combination winds up taking the form of a sort of diffused panopticism, which in turn leads to a kind of internalization of the logic of the regime by the women who live within it. That internalization doesn’t take the form of some sort of blanket brainwashing, which would have brought the novel into the kind of broad satirical critique that one gets from The Stepford Wives. Instead, it entwines that complicity with the very real and understandable desire to survive. In this sense, the republic succeeds by producing a sort of stasis, shifting the antagonism of the women of the society from dominant structures of that society to each other. In this sense, the disciplinary mechanisms of the society diffuse antagonism and allow for a functioning system. Most of the women within the novels are aware that the society is oppressive, but at the same time are far more consumed by the micro-conflicts between the various groups of classification set up by the republic. The disciplinary mechanisms operate through a process of individualization, depending on often deeply personal apparatuses of control, as well as the construction of a grid-like pattern of intelligibility, creating groups with their own functions, rights and responsibilities. Difference is both manufactured at the behest of patriarchal power and at the same time meaningfully creates differences within those dominated groups, inhibiting the possibilities of rebellion.

[1] Interestingly, Atwood has herself strongly embraced the structure of the protests as well as played a significant role in structuring the new television series. In this sense, we’re returning to the book to not only critique the reception of the novel, but the revised authorial interpretation of the work

[2] The paper by Claire Curtis particularly focused on the question of survival and the implications of the protagonists decision to survive on those around her.

A short talk on Darko Suvin

I was contributed to a panel on the relevancy of the work of Darko Suvin in the present moment at the recent Utopian Studies conference.  My paper, like the other papers, is primarily a defense of Suvin's work, albeit with some qualifications.  I'm sympathetic with critics such as China Mieville when they decry Suvin's reductive reading of fantastic literature, but I don't think that this is the most interesting or most important aspect of Suvin's work.  Moreover, they substantially misread Suvin's theoretical framework, notably his understanding of the term, 'science.'  Some of this comes out of the fact that much of Suvin's writings have been out of print for a number of years and have only recently been republished. In any case, the panel's very real interest in Suvin was not shared by conference attendees, and the panel outnumbered the audience for the presentation.  It was unfortunate because I thought all the presentations and the discussion afterwards was quite interesting.  In any case, to get this preliminary investigation slightly more attention, I thought I would post it here. (Apparently, Suvin will or has heard a recording of the talk and I genuinely hope that he liked the talk.  I can't think of a thinker within Science Fiction Studies that has a greater influence on my work.)

The critique of China Mieville represents a dominant interpretation of the work of Darko Suvin at the current moment.  Mieville focuses on Suvin’s distinction between the ‘cognitive estrangement’ of science fiction and the reactionary mystification of fantasy.  He argues that Suvin’s distinction and hierarchy constitutes a sort of neo-Fabian technocratic reasoning and mystifies the construction of both genres. Mieville engages with the limitations of the theoretical framework as developed by Suvin and Carl Freedman, showing how the “cognitive effect” emphasized by both authors is a product of a kind of rhetorical maneuver, a trick on the part of the author to get the reader to accept the cognitive effect of the work in question. Mieville notes that this largely operates as a consensual game, but that the logic implicit in the work of Suvin and Freedman evades the way that the modes of scientific cognition that both celebrate are formed out of and are embedded in the logic and violence of capitalist accumulation.  He rejects the ‘epistemological firewall’ implicit in the concept of cognition and argues that science fiction and fantasy should be seen as slightly different modes of estrangement, both deeply embedded in the ideological matrix of capitalist accumulation.   Mieville is correct to point out the limitation in the construction of this binary, but his critique also rigidifies Suvin’s framework into a kind of technoscientific fetishism. 

These interpretations draw on an understanding of science that Suvin himself rejects in his essay, “Cognition and Estrangement,” which embraces a concept of science that falls under the larger rubric of the German Wissenschaft, which focuses on any form of organized knowledge, rather than simply the natural sciences. Suvin’s refusal of this technoscientific interpretation of the science and cognition is only intensified when we turn to his essay, “Utopian” and “Scientific”: Two Attributes for Socialism from Engels.” That essay frames his critique of Engels opposition of the terms scientific and utopian in a critical examination of the history of the category of science, framing Engel’s use within the shifting meaning of the term.  The article explores the rich tensions within Engel’s essay, and by no mean entirely rejects the work entirely, but refuses Engels’s effort to use the epistemology of the natural sciences of his time as a ‘model for Marxist or socialist historiosophy.’ Suvin argues that all forms of scientific social practice are embedded in the social relations of their time, making the same critiques of capitalist technoscience that Mieville would later include in his critique of Suvin. The science of historical materialism therefore could not take these social practices as a model.

Instead, Suvin rereads Marx to reframe Marx’s engagement with the term science in a way that rejects the science/utopia opposition, instead seeing it as a critical engagement with the utopian tradition.  At the same time, he rejects the formulation of science as the positive science of the natural sciences.  Suvin notes, “Science is here, obviously, thought of by Marx neither as an official social institution nor as an absolute epistemological mode, but as a usable and misusable ensemble of cognition—which is, as in Kant, a pioneering prefiguration I was postulating earlier.” (that is a combination of clearly and firmly demonstrated knowledge that is based on real historico-economic processes as opposed to the more conventionally embraced system building part of the formulation) Revolutionary science is a potentiality that operates in opposition to the dominant structures of our society and as such cannot simply model itself on those structures. “Cognition” becomes not only an exploration of technoscience, but the network of social relations of the capitalist world system, their gaps, lacunae, and contradictions, and the potential transformations within those transformations. Suvin’s position found in this article is remarkably consistent throughout his work.  It can be found in his later writings and it is already found in his critiques of the liberal utopianism of the work of Jules Verne.

Instead of framing his discussion of cognitive estrangement within the confines of either positive science or the narrower technoscientific regime that increasingly stands in for the word science within the present moment, Suvin’s concept of the cognition in cognitive estrangement operates within the register of history.  This engagement with history is made most apparent with his development of the concept of the novum, starting in his essay “SF and the Novum”, which notes, “The new is always a historical category since it is always determined by historical forces which both bring it about in social practice (including art) and make for new semantic meanings that crystallize the novum in human consciousness” (Suvin 80).  The novum operates in a double historical register, both marking out the historical moment that the literary technique operates in historically, and as a marker of the possibility of other worlds that operate in that moment of time.  Within this context, the repeated framework of “post-Cartesian and post-Baconian scientific method” (Suvin 65) becomes another historical framing, intertwining the generic structures of utopian and later science fiction with the rise of the structures of capitalist accumulation, albeit as a marker of alterity.  The novum constantly points to the radical possibilities for other world to exist, worlds that are immanent to the everchanging regime of capitalist accumulation, but are exogenous to it.  This radical dimension of Suvin’s formulation is then stated by critic Tom Moylan.  “Thus, Suvin’s novum is neither the reified “novelty” produced by capitalism nor the vanguard privileged by orthodox Marxism.  Instead, it is the dialectical force that mediates the material, historical possibilities and the subjective awareness and action engaged with those possibilities.” (Moylan 49)

Cognition then cannot be linked to the formations of capitalist technoscience that his critics want to insist upon.  It is not a practice dependent on technoscientific accuracy, but dependent on the rejection of the text’s present as inevitable.  But as I noted before, the firewall between the genres and the emphasis on openings or practices of freedom have their own problems.  I want to potentially register a pair of limitations to this eminently useful framework, both touching on Suvin’s phobic reading of the fantastic.  The first deals with the cognitive limits contained in the fantastic.  Whatever you think of the history of fantastic and gothic literature, it produces a rich symptomology of the limit points of capitalist instrumental reason, the hauntings that point to a logic that is immanent yet exogenous to that logic, even if it can’t comprehend this outside.  More recent fantastic work, whether in the form of China Mieville, Victor Lavalle, or even the more conventional work of Tad Williams has begun to draw on that symptomology in a far more conscious manner, creating a new kind of potentially cognitive fantasy.  The second is a more abstract, which is the rejection of a negativity of limitations, which simultaneously rejects the negativity that is central to creating new forms, whether on the theoretical level, or the level of political or aesthetic practice, even if one does not have a solution to the dilemma.  Within this context, it must be recognized that one may have a cognitive orientation both towards the fantastic and towards blockages and limitations, even when they take the form of aporia. This “cognition” within the “cognitive estrangement” of Suvin’s concept may not be limited to science fiction as Suvin would like it to, but it may still represent the radical critical potential of the genre, a marker of the process of cognitive mapping in literature.  I’m interested in exploring this other potential “cognitive estrangement”, not as an act of conservation, but as a new mode of criticism that draws from the strengths of Suvin’s work, rather than its weaknesses.