I’ve recently been badgering nearly everyone I know with this quandary I’ve landed myself in:  how does science fiction work, and what does that mean for my study of anime?  (go all the way to the end, it has a happy conclusion)

An actual attempt to describe what SF is or how it works would keep us here forever, and I would be the only one to get anything useful from it (I am automatically suspicious of any attempt to identify where SF comes from or what it is).  However, I can examine here one part of that process, in context.  For me, SF is an essentially textual process.  I’m reading a lot of literary methodology, as you might have already noticed.  One of those books is Starboard Wine, by Samuel R. Delany.  I’ve already talked about Delany, too.  Delany’s SF methodology, in short, is wicked-cool.  In several essays, through two books, he goes through the compiling process a reader of SF must go through to make sense of the text, and claims (fairly well) that SF is actually different from mundane fiction.

That’s great and all, but it left me with a problem.  How, then, accepting this methodology as I do, can I deal with SF in visual media — movies and anime, in particular?

I’ve been banging my head against this intermittently for the past few weeks, now.  I kept trying to think of SF movies and anime that would work for me in the same way as my favorite SF books and short stories.  Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell, Real Drive, Rideback, Mazinger, I thought of an awful lot, and none of them sparked for me in the same way as even a mediocre SF novel might.

For instance, I love cyberpunk, and will devour novels in the genre in a few days.  Despite enjoying it almost as much, it took me years to finish Stand Alone Complex, and I still haven’t finished Real Drive.  They don’t appeal as strongly as Neuromancer or Snow Crash (or even the not-nearly-as-good Eastern Standard Tribe, which I still read in two and a half days).   Why shouldn’t cyberpunk in one medium affect me as much as another?  Even when some of them have delicious amalgams of concepts that placate me in outstanding ways?  It seems to come back to precisely what Delany was describing, except in a negative:  they function on a visual level, not a textual level, and thus do not offer to me the same satisfactions I derive from the SF genre generally.

Pontifus had an interesting development when I talked to him about it:  what does appeal about them, then?  I couldn’t answer him then, but usually visual SF seems to appeal to action-movie aesthetics.  Why, for instance, did they add in the silly CGI monsters to I Am Legend when the whole point is that they’re people, but turned to vampires (great book, by the way)?  Because probably the transference wouldn’t happen.

Now, here’s the happy ending I promised:  I have indeed finally come up with some examples of SF, most of them anime, that satisfy me, or might.

• Gundam
• Galaxy Express (and all related bits and pieces)
• Crest of the Stars (and, again, all the other odds and ends)
• Haruhi Suzumiya
• Farscape
• Firefly

Yes, I used a bullet-point list.  I felt like it.

What do all those shows have in common?  They don’t tell us everything about the setting.  They use particular hints and elisions to imply a great deal of information about how the settings are not zero world, but they don’t spend time showing us all the different places like a set of vacation slides (this could, perhaps, explain some of why the prequel Star Wars trilogy falls flat as well).  Text works by building an experience between the audience and the text; it’s impossible to deliver everything (and stuff that tries, like the fantasy-setting of The Wheel of Time, just comes across as tedious), so it uses flourishes and conceits to show us things are different without telling us exactly how.

Eventually, of course, a lot of information will get across to us anyway.  John does get to Earth in Farscape, but not for long.  But these examples all use an economy of setting details to do, in a visual form, what a book does with words:  tell us things by leaving things out.  Heinlein was deservedly famous for this.  The best-known example is from Beyond this Horizon when, in the middle of perfectly normal descriptions, the third-person narrator calmly says “the door dilated.”  No more detail is given, but it completely restructures the reader’s thought processes about the setting. And the fact that the description is so non-chalant tells us even more, that dilating doors, the thing that just blew our minds and our views of the setting, aren’t even all that important.  Wittgenstein, in the Tractatus, claims it “consists of two parts: the one presented here plus all that I have not written.  And it is precisely this second part which is the important one” (qtd. in Margolis, Selves and Other Texts, xi).

Let me kill the two figurative birds with one stone, because it’s possible you’d like to see an explanation that actually uses an anime as an example; also, it will allow me to explain the choice that might be puzzling you — Haruhi.

Haruhi was actually the first example of an anime SF I thought of that satisfied my desires for SF and not just for anime.  It is, like all the other examples, a world that is not our own, and through that allows us to examine both the subject (the typical focus of mundane fiction, like the high-school-drama/comedy Haruhi masquerades as) and the object (one of the foci of SF).  It deals with both the impact of a differed world on people and people’s impact on a differed world.  And it does it all, to use the cinema/television term, behind the scenes.  If the show were to, for instance, show us Haruhi going home after talking to Kyon, getting angry, and, with a split-screen, showing one of the giants getting bigger and angrier, it would lose its place on this list.

The point of SF, then (at least for me, though I’m paraphrasing Delany again here), is to provide a frission between our different audience experiences, for things to appear both familiar and strange at the same time.  Haruhi, like all the anime on my little bullet-point list, does that.   It may be easier to accomplish that in writing, given the fill-in-the-blank nature of prose itself, but it turns out it’s not impossible for TV to do it after all.

It may also finally explain my ambivalent (that is, both like and dislike, that’s what that word means) reaction to Blade Runner.  It’s delicious in its visuals and acting, but spends too much time explaining the Replicants.

Maka says, Read a book! Or she'll take your soul.

It’s been quite a while since I posted anything worthwhile.  I suppose it’s possible that will continue after today, but whatever.  This is a little different from most of the AiC entries, as I’m going to post a piece I wrote for my SF literature class.  It is much in the vein of the AiC posts, sort-of; that is, when he gave us grad. students the assignment (we’re crashing an undergrad. course), he said it was a completely arbitrary assignment that would never be published anywhere.  We’re meant simply to respond to two critical essays he gave us.  I riffed on them in the way I will, sometimes, and have no idea if it’s what he wants to see.  I’m turning it in tomorrow, so we’ll see.  But I just wrote the last paragraph and I’d talked to Pontifus about posting it when it was finished.  It is.  So, uh, woo.  The essays are “On the Origins of Genre” by Paul Kincaid and “Science Fiction and Literature — or, the Conscience of the King” by Samuel Delany.  (Kincaid’s most recent book is up for a non-fiction Hugo this year, by the way.)

In “On the Origins of Genre” Paul Kincaid tracks the movement of science-fiction across its evolution, ultimately coming to the conclusion that the genre has no beginning or end of any significance, and because of that, “science fiction is what we point to when we say ‘science fiction’” (52). We have no single way to identify the genre; there is no fingerprint or DNA matching, only a kind of familial resemblance one might expect from an essay titled after Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.

Kincaid begins the essay by providing a good overview of attempts to define “science fiction,” with entries from critic Darko Suvin to The Oxford Companion to English Literature. He comes to the conclusion that science fiction is too broad and diverse to admit of a definition that would both cover everything readily acknowledged as science fiction and be limiting enough to be of use as a definition. Kincaid ultimately says the act of creating a hard definition will not work.

Similarly John Frow, in his book Genre, suggests that genres provide readers with a “horizon of expectations;” genres use a system of commonly-understood tropes to provide readers with ideas about the work drawn from a kind of pool that already exists (69-70). A work may violate the expectations without becoming another genre. “Genres,” he claims, “are neither self-identical nor self-contained” (71). This process is quite different from using a hard and fast definition (or even one that is not so fast). Frow’s conception of genre is fluid, which in turn allows the text to remain fluid and still use the genre markers it needs to make its meaning. Kincaid and Frow seem to agree on the generic system which draws from a source larger than any one text. I have to wonder if the tradition of attempting to define science fiction is, at least in part, a way to legitimize a genre that still meets occasional resistance from more staid academic circles.

Kincaid also soundly repudiates another habit I have seen in commentators on science fiction: the attempt to find an original science fiction text. On the idea of an “urtext” he says “there is no such thing” (51), unequivocally stating that it is impossible to find a single textual source for the origin of science fiction. I feel this is true of more genres than science fiction. The Gothic genre is often traced directly back to Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto. It’s certainly not wrong to do so, just as it is not wrong for Brian Aldiss to trace science fiction back to Frankenstein, but the Gothic was created both before and after Walpole’s novel. Before in the sense that he willfully drew from medieval romances for many of his elements; after in the sense that the Gothic could not be a genre until enough texts existed to group together and form the pool I alluded to above, the one from which readers draw their expectations for a new work participating in the genre. A genre is always made up of more elements than any single work; attempts to get every genre identifier into a work leads to “kitchen sink” stories that almost never read well. Given the inability of any one text to participate in every identifier of a genre (Castle of Otranto can’t even do it, and it is the first Gothic text for all practical purposes), it seems as though the search for an urtext is essentially futile. Kincaid deals with the problem in a relativistic way by claiming, that tracing the “family resemblances” of science fiction elements “does lead, rather, to a series of urtexts” (51). He goes on to claim that individual threads (tropes) could be traced back in this way, and those may originate in individual texts (52), such as the mad scientist, which can be drawn back to Frankenstein, even though Frankenstein cannot serve as an “urtext” for the genre as a whole. Examining elements rather than either the whole genre or the whole text is more useful, as it provides methods for critics and readers to, in turn, examine the themes and issues within the genre and the texts, which strikes me as much more important.

Samuel Delany’s “Science Fiction and ‘Literature’ – or, The Conscience of the King,” in contrast, attempts to grapple with what people do in that process; it is how people of different sorts make meaning when reading. He primarily focuses on the differences between science fiction and what he terms “literature,” or academically-accepted mainstream fiction. The essay suffers an ambivalence that makes it difficult for a reader to understand, at first, who Delany is criticizing. He refers to not knowing important information about the SF field as “certain academic blind spots” right after summing up an episode wherein a well-respected SF editor he knew had no idea what the Hugo awards were (100-101). He also provides examples of academics failing to know important information about SF, but I am left wondering why he believes it is specifically an academic problem when, by his own admission, it is no such thing.

His greater point, concerning the need for readers of all sorts to pay attention to the field, and not just their perception of it, finally comes clear. He claims that “the assumption of most academic critics [. . .] is that somehow the history of science fiction began precisely at the moment they began to read it” (99). while SF readers “deny all existence to the interpretive space around the SF text” and “assume a conscientiously philistine approach” to set them apart from readers of “literary” fiction (114). Both these views reduce the field of SF writing to what the reader wants. These readers do not admit of anything counter to their desires and will alter or misinterpret whatever they need to in order to maintain their views.

These “ruptures” (the term Delany uses throughout to describe these problems) are clearly bad for the interplay of intelligent discourse around SF, but I am forced to worry whether or not Delany alienates more people from his ideas than he gathers to them in this work. His attitude towards academics, those already in place to do what he asks of readers in a significant and influential way, is dismissive at best. He claims “reading literature as if it were ‘literature’ is [. . .] pretty much a waste of time” (117). This statement, while driving home his point about the proper method of reading, insults anyone who has engaged in traditional reading of literature, even if it is not meant to. Meanwhile, Delany, in summing up the views of the “philistine” SF fans, insults them in almost as bald a fashion. It doesn’t seem to me as though it’s a very helpful strategy.

Delany’s views of reading, as stated in this essay, are enormously compelling and probably the most useful portions of it, though his move to call it “reading as though a text is science fiction” perhaps, again, hobbles the effort. Delany outlines the systems mainstream and SF writing use to make meaning: both use words, but in a science fiction novel any metaphorical phrase, such as “her world exploded” could also be literal, and the reader must strive to make sense of the phrase, always keeping in mind that both the literal and the figurative are both lending meaning to the work at the same time (103-104). I agree with this entirely; his study on the ways in which we organize information in this way and the effects of it are effective and interesting.

Delany’s second major idea, that science fiction reading should overtake “literary” reading (as I referenced it before), is interesting as well, but slightly misled. Delany tells the story of a 19^th century literature scholar who began to consume more SF than mainstream fiction; upon going back to one of his favorite novels, Pride and Prejudice, he found himself enjoying it more, and using the book as a way to wonder about what sort of world it created – whereas, beforehand, he read it as an account of the world as it was when Austen wrote (116). Delany commends this method of reading, claiming it is particular to science fiction. And while I agree SF can make a reader more likely to engage in this reading, it is not that field’s particular birthright. In his essay “On Fairy Stories,” Tolkien describes an alternative to Coleridge’s “suspension of disbelief.” He claims that something unbelievable, such as a fantasy, creates a “secondary world” of the fiction, and within that world all the unbelievable events are just as natural as any other. There is no question of belief, as the world contains them (57-68). This idea can be expanded to all literature, not just fantasy (of which Delany’s SF is a kind). Anything read in a book is not reality, which is obvious; however, when a book is realistic most readers don’t notice. A realistic book is experienced in the same way as a fantastic one: it is read, not heard or seen or felt or smelled. The events of a realistic novel, such as Pride and Prejudice, occur in a secondary world as removed from the real world, by virtue of the way in which is is experienced, as any science fiction novel. Delany has described something very valuable, but in claiming it for SF readers he widens a gap that needs to be closed.

Works Cited

Delany, Samuel R. “Science Fiction and ‘Literature’ – or, The Conscience of the King.” Speculations on Speculation: Theories of Science Fiction. Scarecrow Press, Inc. Maryland: 2005. 95-117.

Frow, John. Genre. Routledge. New York: 2006.

Kincaid, Paul. “On the Origins of Genre.” Speculations on Speculation: Theories of Science Fiction. Scarecrow Press, Inc. Maryland: 2005. 41-53.

Tolkien, J. R. R. “On Fairy Stories.” The Tolkien Reader. New York: Ballantine Books, 1986. 33-99.