“I once wrote an essay titled ‘In the Night, In the Dark: A Note on the Appreciation of Weird Fiction.’ Toward the end of this piece, I asserted: ‘By definition the weird story is based on an enigma that can never be dispelled….’ Semantics aside, the important thing to me in a so-called weird tale is an impenetrable mystery that generates the actions and manifestations in a narrative.” – Thomas Ligotti

“[T]he image of a literary work as a piece of disputed territory over which two or more parties have battled . . . has seemed particularly valid. But even this metaphor suppresses reference to the changing, growing, living quality of such works.” – Michael Hanne

Readers employ many different terminologies to delineate and make sense of texts, from genre writ large (prose varietals, poetry, etc.) to fine distinctions of structure and meaning. Some readers prefer basic categories while others find more enjoyment in complex and detailed descriptions, depending on their intentions and agenda for reading. There are two sorts of distinction that are usually made immediately: real versus unreal, and what “boundaries” the given text lies within, borders upon, and/or crosses. Employing these distinctions make it, on the surface, easy to portray a text in a codified way, to quickly communicate to someone else the essential qualities of a book: its relationship to the real and its location in the conceptual terrain of narratives. Genre-mapping, both in terms of marketing categories and tropic indicators, defines form and content quickly and efficiently, if often incompletely.

I hear this in the bookstore frequently: when not asking for a specific title, a patron will ask for a book based on one of these two characteristics. “Where is your literature/non-fiction/poetry?” “Do you have a science fiction section?” “Are romances in their own area?” When looking for a specific book, patrons assume its location in the store based on these two notions. For example, Charlaine Harris’ books are looked for in SF, Horror, Romance, Mystery, Literature and, more recently, in Media (Television). Some patrons are actually surprised to find them in Horror. When I ask why, the consensus is that they are not “about” horror. They are about relationships, about suspense, about “real stuff” as one patron told me last week.

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Last week I discussed what I thought was a keen idea worth exploring: the notion, taken from Alan Palmer’s book Fictional Minds, that “[r]eaders create a continuing consciousness out of scattered references to a particular character and read this consciousness as an ‘embedded narrative’ within the whole narrative of the novel.” I found a useful contrast between the protagonists of two recent novels and discussed in broad terms the sense of self that emerged from each narrative and speculated about the implications for fantastic literature. In the comments, my friend and colleague Felix Giron brought up an issue that I had not considered in the piece. As she stated in her comment:

“What I am reminded of is, however, that this sense of self is still powerfully influenced by ideas of autonomy and, in many ways, self-sufficiency. This seems to synergize with the ideological concept of the individual and the social and literary context first connected to that idea. Thus the increasingly autonomous and distinct “individual” has a close relationship to “the novel” (whatever that is) and the narratives associated with it. My question is whether the connection you’ve made here between fantastika and the idea of the self is more open than that between the novel and the individual.”

This point, and the question connected to it, crack open the idea of what the sense of self is and its link to the sort of narrative that we call a novel. The more I think about this, the more I wonder about what fantastika has to offer in terms of creating distinctive, insightful, and compelling modes of selfhood within fiction. In general, fictional narratives work to create the boundaries of identity and the parameters of selves that undergird them. A novel is a narrative that is not just fictional, but a particular type of fiction. The form has a range of styles and possibilities linked to the general idea of “a novel” and to the specific productions of it, and what novels produce more than anything else are selves that the reader can relate to and dialogue with. Like ethnographies, novels “enact the process of fictional self-fashioning, in relative systems of culture and language.” What, then, is the link between a sense of emergent self and consciousness in that form, and what distinctive effects can fantastika employ to enrich or complicate both the link and the form?

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We’ve been at the point for some time now where broad generalizations about elements of fantastic fiction are not merely problematic (which has been the case for most of fantastika’s, and literature’s, history), but may limit our understanding of the diversity and adaptability contained in not just the allied genres but within the literary field of production itself. Emerging patterns, shifts in technique and assumptions, and the chaotic foment of creativity often get overlooked or normalized when a general statement is made about “the field” or “the literature” when asserted as dictum rather than hypothesis. As architectural sketches they can be useful as we probe the structure and relations and effects created within and by the literature and its producers and audiences. The trick is to not fully build them in our minds, to not construct edifices of thought that end up blocking our view and walling us off from what is happening around us.

This assertion is a prelude to this week’s discussion because in this column I want to very briefly compose a few of those sketches, keeping in mind both their tentativeness and the fact that they refer to something that is often considered solid or whole but that is in fact fragmented, relational, and in-progress: the sense of self. Criticism and discussion of literature often focuses on either technical or historical facets of a given work; what I want to do in this column is talk about reception and how a particular aspect of a work’s message seems to function. I want to consider the idea that in many works a sense of self is projected via one or more characters that we the readers pick up on and reconstruct, using our knowledge and imagination to not just follow the plot, absorb description, and make connections to create narrative progress, but that we also create in our minds an idea of personality or self that maintains our attention in a long story and providing a consciousness for the reader to interact with throughout the text.

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This week’s title feels like a quotation whose source I cannot recall; I found no such string of words put together like this through Google. But it isn’t an original notion, although perhaps the phrase in parentheses is a new spin on it. I don’t think that it’s terribly profound, but I think it needs to be recalled and considered frequently, especially as we are increasingly inundated with stories in this Radiant Age of ebooks and instant communication and self-publishing and gate-storming and digital opportunism. In fact, we seem to often talk more about the form of books, less about the artistry or the qualities of the fiction, and commerce threatens, as it has many times before, to overwhelm the stories themselves, which may be part of the point of such framings. One of the things we lose in such a discussion is a focus not just on the quality of stories, but their effects.

I’ve been reading Eric Basso’s Decompositions: Essays on Art and LIterature at bedtime. I encourage this as a way to experience Basso’s criticism because what you read seeps into your dreams. This is a collection of pieces that describe and decompose a range of artists and their works, and what Basso turns over as he digs in, what teeming strangeness he reveals, burrows back into the reader’s mind and mulches the imagination. What Basso discovers in each of these artists, from Kafka to Villiers de l’Isle-Adam (and also some visual artists), is that contained within their work is a need to not just represent or structure or comment on the world, but to find a new way to make sense of it. I think this is something that every piece of fiction, from the crassest pulp to the most impenetrable literary tangle, does in some measure; it may be subdued, or hard to discern, or it may scream in your face, but fiction writing is powered by a need of both the writer’s and the reader’s to articulate, interpret, and figure out a bit of life.

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“Fancied associations should not be taken as exclusive and final meanings.” – Frederick Clarke Prescott

“This continuing presence of the weird in literature shows the popular demand for it and must have some basis in human psychosis. The night side of the soul attracts us all. The spirit feeds on mystery. It lives not by fact alone but by the unknowable. . . .” – Dorothy Scarborough

I’m weird.

I know, people (especially in the community of fantastika) assert this often, but this is not some invocation of geek pride or display of dorkish bravado. I am weird. What I mean by this is that I feel that I identify with some of the essential characteristics of this word’s meanings; that the notion effects my thoughts and choices; and that the word is significant enough that I feel affective resonance for what it describes and when it emerges from my reading and thinking. It is not a matter of behavior, nor is it a self-indictment of my social skills; although I am certainly shy and sometimes awkward with others, I don’t think of that as “weird.” Some people are not adept at social interaction and everyone has a distinctive personality that may complicate their interactions with others. That is a fact of life, and that in itself is not “weird.” There is much more to what is weird than that casual, diluted usage of the term.

“Weird” is one of my favorite words, an innovation on a much older group of terms. It goes back to Germanic and Saxon words that meant “to become” or just “fate.” But this seems limiting because we think of fate as less of a becoming than an inevitable status. Both “weird” and “fate” have roots in the pronouncements of gods; the Norns were referred to with variations of this word, such as the werde sisters (and in fact Urðr is the personification of both words, her name based on the Norse cognate of wyrd). While certainly synonymous with “doom” and prophecy, the word is not about inevitability, but about supernatural, inexplicable motion, energies and patterns beyond what we can see. It comes into our language’s predecessors via weorþan: turning, winding, spinning. The foundation of “weird” is of something beyond our control coming to pass, something that can affect our future and that we can attempt to dialogue with, but that has its own logic and process.

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“Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can. Of course, I could be wrong.” – Terry Pratchett

“In reinventing the world of intense, unreproducible, local knowledge, seemingly by a denial or evasion of current reality, fantasists are perhaps trying to assert and explore a larger reality than we now allow ourselves. They are trying to restore the sense — to regain the knowledge — that there is somewhere else, anywhere else, where other people may live another kind of life.

The literature of imagination, even when tragic, is reassuring, not necessarily in the sense of offering nostalgic comfort, but because it offers a world large enough to contain alternatives and therefore offers hope.” – Ursula K. Le Guin

It’s probably obvious that I am a great admirer of Ursula K. Le Guin; I quote her frequently and often cite her works as touchstones or as worthy companions when discussing other works and writers. I discovered her quite early in my literary life and I think she was the first author who profoundly shook me up. I put two of her books on my list of 10 suggestions for the recent NPR poll on SF & Fantasy and think she’s a grand choice for a Nobel Prize (even if I don’t much like the Prize itself). She has been a massive influence on my approach to writing and my critical perspective on literature.

But I only know her through the words she has written and that I have absorbed. I have created an Ursula K. Le Guin in my mind. To me she is a Mobile of the first order and a wizard of great efficacy and wisdom. Even when I disagree with her (which happens more as I grow older and sit with her words, and read others’ responses to them [such as Samuel R. Delany's critique in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw]) she is that durable personage of sagacity and profound wit. I have created an Ursula K. Le Guin in my mind that is sometimes hard to resist, especially when she writes something that, while deeply affecting to me, is also a bit of rubbish.

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“The first dynamic of change has been noticed frequently; that there is a decreasing resemblance between the world we inhabit today and the future worlds advocated, with some consistency of voice and vision, in the American sf of the previous half-century. [...] [T]he old sf story, as it struggled to prevail through the last decades of the century, did remain easy to recognize. It was a First World vision, a set of stories about the future written by inhabitants of, the industrialized Western world, which dominated the twentieth century; simplistically, it was a set of stories about the American Dream.” – John Clute

“Any prediction about what is in fact to come, when cast as fiction, runs the risk not just of being wrong but of being not about the future at all.” – John Crowley

I was happily selected to participate in this week’s SF Signal podcast with Paul Weimer, Jamie Todd Rubin, and Jeff Patterson, where the topic was “visions of the future” in SF. We discussed the futures we liked and disliked, what was effective (or not) in some of these visions, and talked a bit about how the future is conceptualized in SF. What struck me after the conversation was that I felt a struggle between literal acceptance of these futures and a metadiscursive reflection upon them, from a number of angles. By the end of the podcast, we were debating, essentially, what we were looking for not just in the future in front of us, but in the futures of SF.

This distinction is noteworthy because it signals a shift both within the literary field of production and the wider cultural milieu of the contemporary moment. Although, the idea of a “contemporary moment” itself is, I think, breaking down, as changes seem to come so swiftly and newness becomes more than fetish or fashion; it becomes routine. The use of “newness” is intentional because we are not just talking about innovation, about Moore’s Law or Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns, about advancement per se, but specifically about newness, about the infusion of a certain temporality to things, “of recent origin, production, purchase, etc.” The future is a different place than it was less than a generation ago because contemporaneity is different, and our experience of now, our narration of the different emplacements of time, our notion of the dynamism of the moment we occupy, are all not just different, but in flux, in question, and saturated by countless elements that signal to us that we are already “living in the future.”

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“The monstrous body is pure culture. A construct and a projection, the monster exists only to be read. The monstrum is etymologically ‘that which reveals,’ ‘that which warns,’ a glyph that seeks a hierophant.” – Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

I’ve been thinking about monsters and aliens a lot lately, and how they both intersect as concepts and work separately from each other. I just had an article published in Apex Magazine about the cultural influence of H. P. Lovecraft’s “Cthulhu Mythos” and I was struck by how these two categories transform and fuse in his work and in some of its uses as cultural capital and expressive resource. I have also been working on a long-delayed (I have written and discarded two drafts) review of China Miéville’s Embassytown for The Functional Nerds, a novel in which aliens have center stage (sort of). Part of the problem in writing that review, some tangled thematic issues aside, is the fact that I often find aliens less satisfying as a literary device than monsters.

Monsters are, as Pamela Coles noted, “fabulous at getting our attention.” The word that we use to describe these imaginary creatures comes from Latin for “omen, portent, sign.” They have a long history in the human imagination and all sorts of historical and psychological echoes in their formation and narrative use. But that is not why I prefer them over aliens; mythological richness or psychoanalytical resonance is sometimes a problem when thinking about monsters, and can limit their potential. The resources we have for imagining and signifying them are vast, but what makes the conception powerful and illuminative is not just the history of its imagery and uses. They are more flexible and potentially enlightening than that.

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“The particular requirement of awards-that the judges read a whole heap of novels-is, more than anything, the things that makes awards screwy.”- Adam Roberts

“[N]o commentor can altogether avoid participating in the very economy of prestige, the very system of valuing and devaluing, esteeming and disesteeming, that he or she undertakes to examine. My point, though, is. . . . to stress the peculiar resistance prizes seem to have mounted against any real scrutiny of their functions and effects.” – James F. English

In last week’s column I ended my discussion of the Hugo Awards with a question: why is it that the awards incite both spirited defense and myriad criticisms? The point of that question was not to set up more discussion or debates, but to seriously consider what constitutes the effects of these awards. The social and cultural “work” (not the best term, but the best one we have in a discourse saturated with capitalistic meanings) of awards is not just limited to the fact of their granting, or to the ritualized celebration that bestows them on artists, or even to the measure of prestige that they grant to the recipient and back to those that grant them. Awards in general, and the Hugos in particular, are not just objects of exchange and contention in their specific fields and beyond; they are symbols of sodality, of enchantment, and of adumbration.

The Hugo Awards operate within an economy of prestige, a non-financial transactional system of creating and exchanging value that mainly relates to the literary field of production. The Hugos also contribute to the social reproduction of groups and positions within the field and, because of the field’s connections to the capitalist system around it, are potentially effective in increasing the success of the recipient and those associated with them in the financial economy. The Hugos as highly-valued cultural objects influence the relationship of the recipients (and to some extent the nominees) to both economies by accumulating and promulgating symbolic capital. But the awards, in large measure, are less about the winners than they are about the social groups who maintain and use them.

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“[T]he Hugo Awards do not belong to only those who voted for them. If they want them to be awards for the genre(s), then they need to be open to criticism from those who do not, or will not, involve themselves in the process.” – Ian Sales

“No day is an appropriate day to try and cast tarnish on the shiny rocketship trophies.” – Kat Howard (via Strange Horizons)

I had hoped to come up with a more evocative title for this week’s column, but this one gets right to the point. In the comments for last week’s column a number of people pointed out that my discourse on the Hugos’ place within the fantastic literary field of production was incomplete. I had suspected this when I wrote it, and given the response to that column, I will try to expand on that piece this week and next week, and at least provisionally lay out more ideas in greater detail. This time around, I want to talk about the Awards themselves, as cultural objects with assorted relational values and as a focus for struggles of meaning (and thus of their value) within fantastika.

The Hugos are actually three sorts of cultural object: material item, symbolic cultural asset, and organizational product. The iconic chrome rocket trophy is presented to all winners, and generally only the base of the physical award changes from year to year, providing a sleek, polished link between the new awardee and the idealized lineage of SF that the Hugos stand for; it is a tangible object that confers the award’s values directly to the awardee and their work. As asset (and thus an object of contention with power and convertible value), the award has a number of meanings, which I will discuss presently. But that aspect is inseparable from the fact that the Hugos are also the enterprise of a peculiar organization and are produced by a different group of participants in the field each year; that is, the current Worldcon committee. The Hugos are overseen by the World Science Fiction Society, which “is really just a framework for the individual Worldcons — it has no officers and no permanent organization” except for two committees: the Mark Protection Committee and its Marketing Subcommittee.

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“The Hugo Award ceremony. . . expresses for (and to) fandom its self-image, the face by which the community would like to be known in the wider world outside the genre.” – Camille Bacon-Smith

“The custom of awarding prizes, medals, or trophies to artists — selecting outstanding individuals from various fields of cultural endeavor and presenting them with special tokens of esteem — is both an utterly familiar and unexceptional practice and a profoundly strange and alienating one.” - James F. English

For the first time ever, I watched the Hugo Awards this week, in their entirety (yes, including the long pre-ceremony slide show/concert). I have never attended a Worldcon and the biggest award ceremony I have been to is the Shirley Jackson Awards at Readercon. I find them hard to sit through as ceremonies but mesmerising as social endeavours. I am personally ambivalent about and anthropologically fascinated by awards ceremonies, and these feelings are even more pronounced regarding those focused on literature and the fantastic. The Hugo Awards, as “science fiction’s most prestigious award” in English, are particularly intriguing because of their visibility, manner of selection, and place in the culture and history of the field. They are a powerful device for generating symbolic capital and reproducing ideas and distinctions in the literary field of fantastika.

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A few months ago I wrote a blog entry for Apex Book Company that began with this sentence:

“I don’t know whether to admire Samuel Taylor Coleridge or curse him. I am conflicted, because Coleridge coined a phrase that, I am starting to think, has seriously held back our understanding of how we envision the fantastic specifically and fiction in general.”

Sadly, that column was lost when malware attacked the site’s server, but in that time my conflicting feelings have resolved, and I am more certain that the now ubiquitous phrase “suspension of disbelief” obfuscates our thinking about reading fantastic literature. Recently Charlie Jane Anders penned an entry for io9 entitled “Why We Love Suspending Our Disbelief.” While I agree with some of the points she makes, I find that using “suspension of disbelief” as the optic through which she discusses them diminishes our understanding of how we read in general and how we read fantastika in particular.

Fantastika (and often more specifically SF) occupies an overdetermined position in the utilization of the suspension of disbelief: many observers feel that SF requires a higher level of “suspension” to be fully appreciated. “Fiction requires suspension of disbelief, but sf requires a particular kind of suspension of disbelief, conceptually gerrymandered between rhetorics of realism and rhetorics of fantasy given ‘realistic’ appearance by appeals to science and technology,” claims Brooks Landon (oddly enough, in the midst of a discussion of “SF Tourism”). Anders echoes this assertion in her discussion: “One of the great pleasures of science fiction and fantasy is that they ask us to suspend our disbelief more than almost any other fictional genres.” The conceit is that the fantastic genres require far more skill and work to properly enjoy and understand.

But is “suspension of disbelief” actually how we engage a fiction, or any text for that matter? Do we draw our skepticism from its mental scabbard and hold it over the discourse like a Sword of Damocles, ready to strike at the first sign of contradiction or conundrum? Do we flip a switch in our heads that turns our disbelief on or off? The more that I consider how we approach a fantastic work, how texts contain and disseminate their meanings, and how we enliven and decipher texts, the less useful this idea seems. The “willing suspension of disbelief” neither represents the process of reading accurately, nor does it help us understand how we engage texts.

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“Look at this, Russ. A first edition Jack London. Tales of the Fish Patrol. Can you believe it?”

I was five years old, and had just gotten my first pair of spex, providing rudimentary access to what passed for the ubik back then. I wasn’t impressed.

“I can read that right now, Dad, if I wanted to.”

Dad looked crestfallen. “That digital text is just information, son. This is a book! And best of all, it’s mongo.”

I tried to look up mongo in the ubik, like I had been taught, but couldn’t find it in my dictionary. “What’s mongo, Dad?”

“A moment of grace. A small victory over entropy.”

“Huh?”

“It’s any treasure you reclaim from the edge of destruction, Russ. There’s no thrill like making a mongo strike.”

I looked at the book with new eyes. And that’s when I got hooked. From then on, mongo became my life.

- from “Wikiworld,” by Paul Di Filippo

One of the dullest exercises in writing about literature, or really any sort of discussion, is to try to codify the “state” of something, whether it be a genre, a literary practice or product (which loops back to genre), a “trend,” or any sort of discursive or symbolic thingamajig. I think we drive ourselves rather loopy in these efforts to frequently codify the “state” of a concept or field, as if we can solidify it into something unmoving, intact, and graspable. It can be a compelling exercise to tackle such a topic, but generally the result is partial, overly truncated, or engineered to ignore diversity. Of course, any endeavor to codify such things is contingent and subjective, but the notion of “state” in this sense comes from the idea of status, of discerning attributes and conditions of the standing of the subject(s) being discussed. It has a more formal ring to it, an air of higher purpose and discernment; “I will discuss the state of [insert subject here]” sounds more important and prestigious than “I would like to talk about [insert subject here] and some things I noticed about it.”

With that said, this week I want to discuss several short stories that exemplify a promising aspect of the current field of short fantastika. I’ve been reading scads of short stories over the past few weeks and realized that I infrequently review or discuss short fiction. This seems particularly foolish given that I write short fiction and am trying to get some of it published, and that short fiction, while like publishing in general in a state of transition, serves several functions in the literary field, particularly for fantastika. Each story is a text to discuss in its own right, but also indicative of something noteworthy in the larger field of short fiction that contains many pleasures but that still seems underappreciated.

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“[T]he pressures of the market, the dynamics of prestige, and the construction of genealogies are intrinsic features of the web of resemblances that constitutes a genre. Genres are best understood by way of the practices that produce these resemblances and the motives that drive these practices. Pigeon-holing texts as members or non-members of this or that genre is intellectually frivolous, whatever consequences it might have in terms of market value or prestige. This is doubly true because, first, genre itself is an intertextual phenomenon formed out of resemblances or oppositions among texts, and second, no individual text is generically pure. Every text produces within itself a set of generic values in tension with and interacting upon one another” – John Reider

I was all set to discuss several short stories this week, but a cavalcade of suggestions rolled in for recent pieces to read, so I am going to read more, think more, and write about several of them next week. This week, I want to discuss genre in the context of its enduring, shifting excesses and flaws. Last week several folks on Twitter (myself, Paul Jessup, Ian Sales, and Aishwarya S.) had a discussion about the relevance of genre for selecting fiction and deciding on a given work’s connection to others. After a lot of back-and-forth, Paul, who is decidedly finished with genre, stated that “genre just leaves me going meh.” The discussion wound down after that (and I had withdrawn because I was heading to work and had trouble following along on my dumbphone), but a few days later, as I was doing a bit of reading for another article I am working on, I thought back to that discussion and wondered: what is it about genre that is, indeed, meh?

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“‘When I wrote the book there was a background of events in literary criticism in general, tending to reject the idea that criticism had to be thematic and revolve around analysis of the plots, and characters. By the late 60s and early 70s there was a whole trend in criticism that was moving towards treating the texts themselves as language. JHJ was really my attempt to discuss SF texts as language, and bring SF criticism up to date. I probably should have made that really clear at the time, but I wanted to appear much more fresh and innovative than I really was.’ (laughter)” – Samuel R. Delany

“The door deliquesced.

Cool against my thigh, chest, and face, mist from the sill-trough blew back as I lifted my foot over the — “Hey, don’t step in that!” I pushed up at Rat’s shoulder –

His big foot came down with the heel a centimeter beyond the trough rim. he staggered around to face me, not looking surprised.

“You’re supposed to step over. You yell at little kids for getting their feet wet in the door trough.” I laughed. “Look…” as I stepped over.

The blue liquid, behind us now, began to foam; the foam rose, climbing at the jambs faster than in the middle; and darkening, and shutting out light as the door’s semicrystals effloresced.”

- Samuel R. Delany, from Stars in My Pockets Like Grains of Sand

I discovered The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction in 2009 at Readercon. While I had long admired (no, adored, felt dizzily annihilated by, was dazzled and delighted and upset and puzzled and overthrown and reinvigorated by) Samuel R. Delany’s fiction (since reading Nova in 1981), I had never read any of his non-fiction. I had only the year before returned to the world of fantastika after a long exile in unrelated academia, and was hungry not just for stories, but for ways to look at the literary field after a dozen years away from it. Strolling through the Dealer’s Room I came to the Wesleyan University Press table, and was startled to find Mr. Delany sitting there, with a few copies of his just re-issued book at his elbow.

I am terribly shy in person, so it took a great effort to approach him, but he was affable and signed a copy of the book for me (I later brought my old copy of Nova, the 1975 Bantam reissue, which I had kept since high school, for him to sign). I made off with my purchase hoping to read some of it immediately, but was, as usual, seduced by the allure of readings and panels and kaffeeklatsches that put all thoughts of reading, paradoxically, out of my head. When I finally did read it that fall, it was a revelation, and a wistful engagement, of ideas about how SF on the page works as we read it, and how our very notions of reading affect our reception of the words. Two years later, sitting at this year’s Readercon panel about the book, I felt, in a rather artificially narrativized way I suppose, that I had come to a new phase of a journey with Delany’s work, and this book in particular.

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“I prefer perplexity, doubt, uncertainty, not just because it provides a more ‘productive’ literary raw material, but because that is the way we humans really are.” – Jose Saramago

“It led to what I shall call a culture of uncertainty taking ahold of the artistic imagination. Intellectual uncertainties challenged the greatest artists and writers to explore the limits of human knowledge, and the problems and dilemmas that result from these, and in doing so examine the complex relationship between reality and illusion, fact and fiction. This led to the creation of works of art and literature which in turn sought to challenge the viewer/reader.” – Jeremy Robbins

Some of you may have noticed that I took a sort of break last week, turning in a review instead of the regular column. I was finishing what will hopefully be my first non-fiction sale in some time and preparing for my yearly pilgrimage to Readercon, which is my favorite convention, bar none. The panels and conversations and the unique sensory overload of discussing and being around books for a long weekend has a profound, nearly hallucinogenic effect upon my mind, and I come away from Readercon brimming with new insights and ideas and a renewed vigor to write. The next few columns will be meditations and cogitations on some of the thoughts and revelations bubbling out of my head from those three days.

The first topic I want to discuss is uncertainty in fantastika, which popped up not just during the panel “The (Re)turn of the Screw.” The panel was asked to discuss the return of a certain lack of clarity in the fantastic, but much more time was spent refuting the premise and focusing instead on the question of uncertainty. This notion surfaced as an issue in a few other panels, such as the one on “Surrealism and Strong Emotions” and, in somewhat different fashion, during the panel on “Plausible Miracles and Eucatastrophe.” What arose frequently in the panel discussions, and most strongly in the first one I have listed, was a question about the intersection between intention, interpretation, and the instability that arises between expectation and assimilation of a text. Uncertainly is decried by some readers, lauded by others, and an issue which writers often struggle with both creatively and in the aftermath of their texts’ reception. At the same time, the production and experience of uncertainty is ambivalent and, well, uncertain. As the quotation from Robbins above demonstrates, uncertainty has been a part of literature for some time, although we should probably resist comparisons between the current era and the Baroque. Rather than see it as a problem, or merely a variable of language, which would just make it into a state, I want to ponder this disturbing, fluid contention in relation to the vitality of fantastika and how it appears in a few instances.

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“So it goes indeed. Fact is, Genre is a dirty and disreputable part of town but it’s that way for a reason, and at the end of the day, the librarian kinda likes it. This is a place where freaks and weirdos feel at home. The bars here are more fun. The rent is cheap. And Mass Market Square is infinitely more dynamic, exciting, and relevant than the uptown galleries full of middle-class bores clinking champagne glasses and droning on about how jejune the latest wunderkind is really, darling, just so trite, really, overhyped. There’s a trade-off between the social stigma and squalid trappings of the Genre ghetto and the freedom that it gives to work outside the tight-ass strictures of ‘proper literature’ which generally also means the tight-ass strictures of contemporary realism.

Besides, a change is in the air.” - Hal Duncan

“SF is dying; but then SF has always been dying, it has been dying from the very moment of its constitution” – Roger Luckhurst

It may seem strange at first to talk about “The Death of Science Fiction” as something dynamic, rather than just a change in state, but despite its sometimes exasperating format and pre-determined outcome (since SF never actually “dies”) the fact that this idea is given life so often makes it necessary to consider the source of its vitality. My proposal, at least for now, is that the fables of this death and their effects on the readers and writers who narrate, read, and respond to them are attempts to grasp, codify, and represent the mythogenic rejuvenation of SF. These narrative episodes are part of SF’s mythology, reiterating and reestablishing aspects of it, seeking to understand SF’s storied, contested, confabulated history and the genre’s frequent renewal by its practitioners and readers. SF is based less on clear lines of relation to the past than other genres, is much more mutable and predatory, and relies on the redevelopment and proliferation of mythical ties and sources in the past and linkages laterally to contemporary genres and trends to maintain both its longevity and its freshness.

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“Doomsayers continued to predict the imminent demise of science fiction throughout 1997, some of them even seeming to look forward to it with gloomy, headshaking, I-told-you-so-but-you-wouldn’t-listen-to-me relish; but . . .it seems to me that the actual numbers and the actual real-world situation do not justify these sorts of gloomy predications. To modify the words of Mark Twain, the Death of Science Fiction has been greatly exaggerated.” - Gardner Dozois

“This uncomfortable impure origin does nothing. however, to calm the anxieties for legitimation, nor can it, since the demands for legitimacy appeal to an external authority. The fantasy of non-origin persists, and it meets its complement in the future with the fantasy of non-being. Explicit proposals, even demands, for the death of science fiction, from within science fiction, are commonplace.This is the ecstatic process of transubstantiation back into the mainstream . . . .” – Roger Luckhurst

“SF isn’t dying, it hasn’t been ill, and frequent terminal diagnoses often see the undertaker clutching a handful of nails and a hammer and scratching his head over an empty coffin. However, discussions about this demise have been resurrecting themselves in only slightly altered form since I first read ‘about’ SF rather than SF itself. I’m betting there was some plonker declaring the death of SF the moment Sputnik beeped or just after Neil Armstrong stepped onto the Moon. Really, the whole pointless staggering debate needs a nice fat stake driven through its heart. ” – Neal Asher

“The Death of Science Fiction” has been with us for a long time. It is a perennial topic, nigh unto a trope at this point. Writers from Kristine Kathryn Rusch to John C. Wright have discussed it. Richard Lupoff bemoaned it in the early 1980s and early last year Sarah A. Hoyt observed that it was more of a killing than just SF expiring. Mark Charan Newton just weeks before that defended this idea at length, arguing further that the specific genre was dying, while other sorts of fantastika were doing better.

There are many more, but what is fascinating about this idea is not just how many people discuss it or how often the topic seems to arise, but that it has at this point a quality of mythogenic rejuvenation that draws some to it while mightily irritating others. While some users of the term (like Newton) genuinely see the end of Science Fiction, many others, and many who respond to the idea, either feel that the idea is incorrect or that it is a call to action, myself included at one point. I’ve written about this previously elsewhere; but as I examine the pervasiveness of this idea, the combination of anxiety and passionate engagement that it seems to produce, and the constant return to it as a fabled touchstone, I am curious to figure out the notion’s power and why it seems to be – rhetorically, symbolically, socially – so necessary for the resurrection of this foreseen death that never actually occurs.

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“Science fiction at its best should be crazy and dangerous, not sane and safe. Overly polished, stingy, lifeless stories are the bane of the genre.” – Paul Di Filippo

“The immersion you have in a dream can be like the immersion you have in a film or book. The imagined world rolls on, and you roll with it, taking for granted the twists and turns and impossible demands made of you. This is a peculiar thing.” – Tom Stafford

“While we read a novel, we are insane–bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren’t there, we hear their voices… Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.” – Ursula K. Le Guin

One of the conundrums that preoccupies my mind far too much flourishes in the fecund interpretive ground that lies between what writers and readers do when they perform their particular construction of texts. While writers compose texts, they do so in an extended process not just of composition, but also of reading, re-reading, and shaping the text to communicate particular meanings, whether of exacting specificity or vast interpretability or something in-between, with some conception of a reader in mind. Readers come to a text with assorted expectations and preconceptions (often of the writer, not just the book) and through their reading construct their own interpretation of the author’s representations. The conundrum that worries at my thoughts is: if both reader and writer bring the text into being, can we ever really know whose understanding of and influence on the text’s meanings and messages more profoundly shapes its reception?

This is, I admit, a rather daft thing to fret about, partly because there likely isn’t a definitive answer to the perplexing question. But when I was offered the chance to review a few of the essays from the e-book publisher 40k Books, I quickly noticed several titles in their catalog that promised to address that thorny, perhaps unanswerable, question. I chose one that focused on a writer discussing his craft, and another that examined the idea of story from the perspective of a reader. The two of them proved to be stimulating, if uneven, excursions into my little obsession.

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(Note: due to an avalanche of technical problems, I was not able to write the column I had intended for this week. Next week I will be reviewing some essays from 40k Books and talking about how writers and readers approach the story in fiction)

“Wondering’s healthy. Broadens the mind. Opens you up to all sorts of stray thoughts and possibilities.” – Charles de Lint

“If the unusual character of the stimulus extends so far as to present to the perceiving mind in no uncertain degree the conception of improbability (such as a story of a trip to the moon and back; or the story of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) the very improbability will tend to abbreviate or even, in some cases, entirely abrogate a state of curiosity in favor of one of wonder, providing always that the improbability is not so great as to instantly destroy all possibility of belief. The improbably is sometimes ridiculous; sometimes it is wonderful. Within the bounds of belief the very sense of the improbability clouds the effort of curiosity to find a sufficient explanation, and gives in advance a sense of the abortiveness in which the effort must end. Such a state is distinctly favorable to wonder. Most important, however, is this fact: that where the stimulus is the improbable, it is found, by the very nature of the case, and at least nine times out of ten, in the form of a story — not in the form of immediate first-hand experience. In this fact alone lies a justification of the critical study of wonder in literature.” - Benjamin Putnam Kurtz

I love this quotation from Kurtz, which is why I transcribed it in its entirety. I first encountered it in college while writing a paper on Irish drama. I was picking apart George Fitzmaurice’s The Magic Glasses, which I found to be delightfully fantastical but still bothersome with its excessive melodrama and broadly-drawn characters. It was bothersome to me that the play had a number of very obvious faults, yet there were moments when I felt a bit of awe, a taste of the strange allure of Jaymony’s artifact. I labored to understand my response to the play’s situation, a combination of marvelling and horror. I worked as an assistant in the library’s reference area so in my free time between patrons I looked around for ways to think about the tension between those two feelings, and at some point came upon Kurtz’s book.

It led me to the beginning of an answer, but more importantly got me thinking about the idea of wonder itself. I never had the time to explore the idea in more depth, and then years passed and I, in some rash, foolish ways, walked away from wonder. When I returned to the social and literary realms of fantastika I began to, well, wonder about wonder again (and I wonder how many emotions and thought-processes we can apply to understand themselves!), how essential it is to deeply interacting with fantastic literature, to writing it, reading it, talking about it, feeling the words and ideas and conjured people and worlds circulating through your mind. What immediately comes to mind is the Spindizzy from James Blish’s Cities in Flight, of some device, some translator and converter of energy that could move huge, almost imponderable things better than little, prosaic details. And yet, what I envision is one that goes widdershins, one that does not make great things fly, but anchors them in our thoughts and dreams, pulls them towards us and allows us to dwell in them rather than merely watching them fly off, unreachable amongst the stars. Wonder changes the gravity of the imagination and pulls the improbable and impossible and miraculous and marvellous inside us.

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