The hugely increased repertoire of sentences science fiction has to draw on (thanks to this relation between the “science” and the “fiction”) leaves the structure of the fictional field of sf notably different from the fictional field of those texts which, by eschewing technological discourse in general, sacrifice this increased range of nontechnological sentences—or at least sacrifice them in the particular, foreground mode. Because the added sentences in science fiction are primarily foreground sentences, the relationship between foreground and background in science fiction differs from that of mundane fiction. The deposition of weight between landscape and psychology shifts. The deployment of these new sentences within the traditional sf frame of “the future” not only generates the obviously new panoply of possible fictional incidents; it generates as well an entirely new set of rhetorical stances: the futureviews-the-present forms one axis against which these stances may be plotted; the alien-views-the-familiar forms another. All stories would seem to proceed as a progression of verbal data which, through their relation among themselves and their relation to data outside themselves, produce, in the reader, data-expectations. New data arrive, satisfying and/or frustrating these expectations, and, in turn and in concert with the old, produce new expectations—the process continuing till the story is complete. The new sentences available to sf not only allow the author to present exceptional, dazzling, or hyperrational data, they also, through their interrelation among themselves and with other, more conventional sentences, create a textus within the text which allows whole panoplies of data to be generated at syntagmatically startling points. Thus Heinlein, in Starship Troopers, by a description of a mirror reflection and the mention of an ancestor’s nationality, in the midst of a strophe on male makeup, generates the data that the first-person narrator, with whom we have been traveling now through a hundred and fifty-odd pages (of a two-hundred-and-fifty-page book), is non-caucasian. Others have argued the surface inanities of this novel, decried its endless preachments on the glories of war, and its pitiful founderings on repressed homosexual themes. But who, a year after reading the book, can remember the arguments for war—short of someone conscientiously collecting examples of human illogic? The arguments are inane; they do not relate to anything we know of war as a real interface of humanity with humanity: They do not stick in the mind. What remains with me, nearly ten years after my reading of the book, is the knowledge that I have experienced a world in which the placement of the information about the narrator’s face is proof that in such a world much of the race problem, at least, has dissolved. The book as text—as object in the hand and under the eye—became, for a moment, the symbol of that world. In that moment, sign, symbol, image, and rhetoric collapse into one, nonverbal experience, catapulted from somewhere beyond the textus (via the text) at the peculiarly powerful trajectory only sf can provide. But from here on, the description of what is unique to science fiction and how it works within the sf textus that is, itself, embedded in the whole language—and language-like—textus of our culture becomes a list of specific passages or sets of passages: better let the reader compile her or his own.
I feel the science-fictional enterprise is richer than the enterprise of mundane fiction. It is richer through its extended repertoire of sentences, its consequent greater range of possible incident, and through its more varied field of rhetorical and syntagmatic organization. I feel it is richer in much the same way atonal music is richer than tonal, or abstract painting is richer than realistic. No, the apparent “simplemindedness” of science fiction is not the same as that surface effect through which individual abstract paintings or particular atonal pieces frequently appear “impoverished” when compared to “conventional” works, on first exposure (exposed to, and compared by, those people who have absorbed only the “conversational” textus with which to “read” their art or music). This “impoverishment” is the necessary simplicity of sophistication, meet for the far wider web of possibilities such works can set resonating. Nevertheless, I think the “simple-mindedness” of science fiction may, in the end, have the same aesthetic weight as the “impoverishment” of modern art. Both are manifestations of “most works in the genre”—not the “best works.” Both, on repeated exposure to the best works, fall away by the same process in which the best works charge the textus—the web of possibilities—with contour.
The web of possibilities is not simple—for abstract painting, atonal music, or science fiction. It is the scatter pattern of elements from myriad individual forms, in all three, that gives their respective webs their densities, their slopes, their austerities, their charms, their contiguities, their conventions, their clichés, their tropes of great originality here, their crushing banalities there: The map through them can only be learned, as any other language is learned, by exposure to myriad utterances, simple and complex, from out the language of each. The contours of the web control the reader’s experience of any given sf text; as the reading of a given sf text recontours, however slightly, the web itself, that text is absorbed into the genre, judged, remembered, or forgotten.
In wonder, awe, and delight, the child who, on that evening, saw the juggernaut howl into the dark, named it “Red Squealer.” We know the name does not exhaust; it is only an entrance point into the textus in order to retrieve from it some text or other on the contours, formed and shaped of our experience of the entities named by, with, and organized around those onomastic metonyms. The textus does not define; it is, however, slightly, recontoured with each new text embedded upon it, with each new text retrieved from it. We also know that the naming does not necessarily imply, in the child, an understanding of that textus which offers up its metonyms and in which those metonyms are embedded. The wonder, however, may initiate in the child that process which, resolved in the adult, reveals her, in helmet and rubber raincoat, clinging to the side-ladders, or hauling on the fore- or rear- steering wheel, as the Red Squealer rushes toward another blaze.
It may even find her an engineer, writing a text on why, from now on, Red Squealers had best be painted blue, or a bell replace that annoying siren—the awe and delight, caught pure in the web, charging each of her utterances (from words about, to blueprints of, to the new, blue, bonging object itself) with conviction, authenticity, and right.
39. Everything in a science-fiction novel should be mentioned at least twice (in at least two different contexts), with the possible exception of science fiction.
40. Omitted pages from an sf novel:
Saturn’s Titan had proved the hardest moon to colonize. Bigger than Neptune’s Triton, smaller than Jupiter’s Ganymede, it had seemed the ideal moon for humanity. Today, there were only research stations, the odd propane mine, and Lux—whose major claim was that it bore the same name as the far larger city on far smaller Iapetus. The deployment of humanity’s artifacts across Titan’s surface more resembled the deployment across one of the gas giants’ “captured moons”—the under- six-hundred-kilometer-diameter hunks of rock and ice (like Saturn’s Phoebe, Neptune’s Nereid, or a half-dozen-plus of Jupiter’s smaller orbs) that one theory held to have drifted out from the asteroid belt before being caught in their present orbits. Titan! Its orangish atmosphere was denser (and colder) than Mars’s—though nowhere near as dense as Earth’s. Its surface was marred with pits, rivers, and seas of methane and ammonia sludge. Its bizarre lifeforms (the only other life in the Solar System) combined the most unsettling aspects of a very large virus, a very small lichen, and a slime mold. Some varieties, in their most organized modes, would form structures like blue coral bushes with, for upwards of an hour at a time, the intelligence of an advanced octopus. An entire subgenre of ice-operas had grown up about the Titan landscape. Bron despised them. (And their fans.) For one thing, the Main Character of these affairs was always a man. Similarly, the One Trapped in the Blue, Coral-like Tentacles was always a woman (Lust Interest of the Main Character). This meant that the traditional ice-opera Masturbation Scene (in which the Main Ch
aracter Masturbates while Thinking of the Lust Interest) was always, for Bron, a Bit of a Drag. And who wanted to watch another shindo expert pull up another ice-spar and beat her way out of another blue-coral bush, anyway? (There were other, experimental ice-operas around today in which the Main Character, identified by a small “MC” on the shoulder, was only on for five minutes out of the whole five-hour extravaganza, Masturbation Scene and all—an influence from the indigenously Martian Annie-show—while the rest was devoted to an incredible interlocking matrix of Minor Characters’ adventures.) And the women who went to them tended to be strange—though a lot of very intelligent people, including Lawrence, swore Titan-opera was the only really select artform left to the culture. Real ice-opera—better-made, truer-to-life and with more to say about it via a whole vocabulary of real and surreal conventions, including the three formal tropes of classical abstraction, which the classical ice-opera began with, ended with, and had to display once gratuitously in the middle—left Lawrence and his ilk (the ones who didn’t go into ego-booster booths) yawning in the lobby.
41. The structure of history tends to be determined by who said what. The texture of life is determined by who is listening.
42. Though few science-fiction writers enjoy admitting it, much science fiction, especially of the nuts-and-bolts variety, reflects the major failure of the scientific context in which most technology presently occurs: the failure, in a world where specialization is a highly productive and valued commodity, to integrate its specialized products in any ecologically reasonable way—painfully understandable in a world that is terrified of any social synthesis, between black and white, male and female, rich and poor, verbal and nonverbal, educated and uneducated, underprivileged and privileged, subject and object. Such syntheses, if they occur, will virtually destroy the categories and leave all the elements that now fill them radically revalued in ways it is impossible to more than imagine until such destruction is well underway. Many of the privileged as well as the underprivileged fear the blanket destruction of the products of technology, were such a radical value shift to happen. Even so, both privileged and nonprivileged thinkers are questioning our culture’s context, scientific and otherwise, to an extent that makes trivial, by comparison, the blanket dismissal of all things with dials that glitter (or with latinate names in small print at the bottom of the labels) that the urban advocates of back-to-the-soil humanism sometimes claim to indulge. Within the city, because of the overdetermined context, even to attempt such a dismissal is simply to doom oneself to getting one’s technology in grubbier packages, containing less-efficient brands of it, and with the labels ripped off so that you can be sure what’s inside. Those who actually go back to the soil are another case: The people on the rural communes I have visited—in Washington with Pat Muir, and those in California around Muir Woods (coincidentally named after Pat’s grandfather)—were concerned with exploring a folk technology, a very different process from “dismissal.” And the radio-phonograph (solid-state circuitry) and the paperback book (computerized typesetting), just for examples, were integral parts of the exploration.
That science fiction is the most popular literature in such places doesn’t surprise.
What other literature could make sense of, or put in perspective, a landscape where there is a hand-loom, a tape-recorder, a fresh butter churn, ampicillin forty minutes away on a Honda 750, and both men and women pushing a mule-drawn plow, cooking, wearing clothes when clothes answer either a functional necessity (boots, work-gloves . . .) or an aesthetic appetite (hand-dyed smocks, bearded vests . . .) and going naked when neither necessity nor appetite is present; or where thousands of such people will gather, in a field three hundred miles from where they live, to hear music from musicians who have come a thousand miles to play it for them?
What the urban humanist refuses to realize (and what the rural humanist often has no way of realizing) is that our culture’s scientific context, which has given us the plow, the tape-recorder, insecticides, the butter-churn, and the bomb, is currently under an internal and informed onslaught as radical as our social context is suffering before the evidence of Women’s Liberation, Gay Activism, Radical Psychiatry, or Black Power.
Much science fiction inadvertently reflects the context’s failure.
The best science fiction explores the attack.
43. The philosophically cherished predicates of all the sensory verbs in the Indo-European languages are, today, empirically empty verbal conventions—like the “it” in “it is raining.” The very form “I see the table” suggests that, in the situation “I” would commonly model with those words, “I” am doing something to the table, by “seeing” it, in some sense similar to what “I” would be doing to it in the situation “I” would commonly model by the words “I set the table.” Empirically, however, we know that (other than at the most minute, Heisenbergian level), in the situation we use “I see the table” to model, the table is—demonstrably!—doing far more to “I” than “I” am doing to it. (Moreover, though words like “I” and “see” were used to arrive at the demonstration, the demonstration itself could be performed effectively for a deaf-mute who had learned only the nonverbal indicators, such as pointing, miming of motion and direction, picture recognition, etc. The reading of various sense data as the persistence of matter and coherence and direction of motion, which is basically what is needed to apprehend such a demonstration, seems to be [by recent experiments on babies only a few hours old] not only preverbal but programmed in the human brain at birth, i.e., not learned.) A language is conceivable that would reflect this, where the usual model of this situation would be a group of verbal particles that literally translated: “Light reflects from table then excites my eyes.” Equally conceivable, in this language, the words “I see the table” might be considered, if translated from ours literally, first, as ungrammatical, and, second, as self-contradictory as “the rock falls up” (or “the table sees me”) appears in ours. By extension, all predicates in the form “The subject senses . . .” (rather than “The object excites . . .”) are as empty of internal coherence against an empirical context as “The color of the number seven is D-flat.” (Among poets, an intuitive realization of the hopeless inadequacy of linguistic expressions in the form “I sense . . .” accounts for much of the “difficulty” in the poetry of the last twenty-five years—a very different sort of difficulty from the labored erudition of the poetry of the thirty years previous.) As models for a situation, neither the “I see . . .” model nor the “light reflects . . .” model is more logical; but that is only because logic lies elsewhere. One model is simply, empirically, more reasonable. Empirical evidence has shown that the implied arrows “inside” these words simply do not reflect what is the case. A good bit of philosophical wrangling simply tries to maintain that because these arrows were once considered to be there, they must still model something.
There was a time when people thought electricity flowed from the positive to the negative pole of a battery. The best one can say is that there were many situations in which the current’s direction didn’t matter. And many others in which it did. Trying to maintain the meaningful direction of sense predicates is like maintaining that in those situations in which it doesn’t matter which way the current flows, somehow it is actually flowing backwards.
44. Galaxy of events over the past few months: the telegram announcing Marilyn’s collection of poems Presentation Piece had won the Lamont Poetry Selection for the year; the terribly complimentary statement by Richard Howard, which will go on the book’s back cover; a glowing review by the Kirkus Service that is so muddle-headed, one would have almost preferred no review at all!
45. Various deaf-mute friends I have had over the years, and the contingent necessity of learning sign language, have given me as much insight into spoken and written language as oral storytelling once gave me into written stories: Hand-signs, spoken words, and written words produce incredibly different contextual responses, though
they model the same object or process. The deaf-and-dumb sign language progresses, among ordinary deaf mute signers, at between three and five hundred words a minute (cf. ordinary reading speeds), and the learner who comes from the world of hearing and speaking is frequently driven quite mad by the absence of concept words and connectives. (Logicians take note: Both “and” and “or” are practically missing from demotic sign language; though the sign for “and” exists, “or” must be spelled out by alphabetic signs, which usually indicates an infrequently used word.)
Lanky and affable Horace would occasionally leave me notes under my room door (on the ninth floor of the Albert) written with “English” words, all using their more or less proper dictionary meaning, but related to one another in ways that would leave your average English speaker bewildered.
There is a sign for “freeze”—a small, backwards clutch, with the palms of the hands down.
There is a sign for “you”—pointing to the “listener” with the forefinger.
As in English, “freeze” has many metaphorical extensions: “to stop moving,”“to treat someone in a cold manner,” etc. The two signs, mimed consecutively—”freeze you”—can mean:
“You have a cold personality.”
“You are frozen.”
“Are you frozen?”
“Stop moving.”
“You just stopped moving, didn’t you!” (in the sense of“You jumped!”)
This last is a particularly interesting case: the signed phrase could also be translated “You flinched!” The speaker who says, “You jumped!” models the beginning of the motion; the deaf-mute who signs, “Freeze you” is modeling the end of the same motion. In both cases, the partial model (or synecdoche) stands for the whole action of “flinching.”