They said the Wilds could never be tamed. If only they could see us now.

Here’s the tl;dr version of Bastion’s setting. You know how JRPG worlds often feel like medieval Europe and medieval-Europe-flavored fantasy run through a strange and colorful culture grinder? Bastion’s landscape is like that, except its raw materials largely come from North America.

Now, the long, spoiler-filled version.

In Bastion, your character belongs (or belonged) to a migrant people from a vague Motherland across the sea. From their City upon a hill, they spread out across their adopted continent, subduing the wilderness, mining energy resources, and so on. And they built a wall, and kept pushing this wall outward as they grew — that was the hero’s job. It was a culture paradoxically fascinated with acquisition and intent on keeping unwanted elements out — a culture happy to accommodate, if not entirely accept, foreigners willing to serve as laborers, foreigners such as the inhuman but intelligent Windbags.

You can see the grimdark potential there (and I guess it is a post-apocalypse story, after all). But Bastion’s as fun as it is partly because it isn’t just an extended metaphor. It takes North American cultural artifacts and makes them fit in a fantasy world. For example, the mechanical bull becomes an idol, an object of worship. (Note, also, that religion in Caelondia is a commercial enterprise.)

In their efforts to domesticate the wilderness, the Caelondian Brushers found themselves at odds with a whole bunch of spiky plants.

You’ll run into these, too, but fortunately you’ll have at your disposal “the weapon that conquered the continent” and a pair of dueling pistols.

Let’s get back to the history, though. It’s important.

Eventually, inevitably, the Rippling Wall reached the borders of the Ura, a people not content to assimilate and become miners and trash collectors. And here’s where it gets difficult to drop appropriate links. The Ura aren’t a clear analogue for, say, the Native Americans or Mexico, though you could make a case for one or the other. Suffice to say that they were residents of coveted land, people with a civilization in place, and that war ensued. It’s a familiar story.

And it might’ve been a long story, but it was made short by the Mancers of Caelondia, who devised a way to close off the ancestral burrows of the Ura. It didn’t work, for various reasons. The result is the fragmented, floating world in which the game takes place.

Expansionism with shattering consequences. Fair enough. Except in Bastion, you can undo it — you can turn back time, if you so choose.

Is it wish fulfillment on a grand scale? Well, not exactly — before you’re offered the choice between rewinding the world or living with the consequences, you’re reminded that there’s really nothing stopping the Calamity from happening again. Maybe it’s inevitable. How far back would you have to turn the clock before that wasn’t the case? How many time loops have we been through, anyway?

Bastion’s final lesson, then, seems to be that history, big mess of causation that it is, is complicated. That to write history is to guess at things.

What does it mean to pursue the past at the cost of the present? What does it mean to shoulder your less-than-sterling heritage and move on? And why isn’t Bastion a standard text in every U.S. history class ever?

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.