It needs no great critical faculty to observe that most SF is not about ‘a search for the definition of man’; it is about telling a story to please the reader—and in that it is no different from any other literature. Only when SF texts are piled together do we see a common restlessness about where mankind is heading through its own blind efforts. More questionable is that phrase about the Gothic mould.
I am not one hundred per cent sure about the phrase myself, but this much is clear: I got it from Leslie Fiedler. Fiedler writes the kind of criticism one can read with enjoyment, unlike most of the criticism which originates from within the orbit of SF academia. Fiedler has this to say of the Gothic mode, following on a discussion of Monk Lewis’s The Monk of 1976:
The major symbols of the gothic have been established, and the major meanings of the form made clear. In general, those symbols and meanings depend on an awareness of the spiritual; isolation of the individual in a society where all communal systems of value have collapsed or have been turned into meaningless clichés. There is a basic ambivalence to the attitude of the gothic writers to the alienation which they perceive. On the one hand, their fiction projects a fear of the solitude which is the price of freedom; and on the other hand, an almost hysterical attack on all institutions which might inhibit that freedom or mitigate the solitude it breeds … The primary meaning of the gothic romance, then lies in its substitution of terror for love as a central theme of fiction … Epater la bourgeoisie: this is the secret slogan of the tale of terror. (Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (1960))
Spiritual isolation, alienation—these lie also at the heart of SF, like serpents in a basket.
Fiedler defines the sort of fiction that most of my admired contemporaries were writing. I saw in them, too, a reflection of my own responses to society which prompted me towards science fiction. The love of art and science I developed as a child was a rebellion against the smug bourgeois society in which I found myself. Art and Science were what They hated most. In this way, I reinforced the solitude I felt. This also: I merely wished to épater society, not overthrow it; the satirist needs his target.
This stinging function of SF was always apparent, from the days of Mary Shelley (Frankenstein, like its progenitor, Caleb Williams, contains more punitive litigators than punitive monsters within its pages), through H. G. Wells, and Campbell’s Astounding, until the time when I sat down to write BYS in 1970. During the 1970s and 1980s, SF became widely popular, widely disseminated. Its sting has been removed. The awful victories of The Lord of the Rings, Star Trek and Star Wars have brought—well, not actually respectability, but Instant Whip formulas to SF. The product is blander. It has to be immediately acceptable to many palates, some of them prepubertal. Even the sentimentality of such as Spider and Jeanne Robinson’s ‘Stardance’ is not considered too sickly sweet for consumption. As Kurt Vonnegut ripened on the tree and fell with a thud to earth, so too did the nutritive content of SF.
The nutritive content has been fixed to suit mass taste. Nowadays the world, or solar system, or the universe, or the Lord Almighty, has to be saved by a group of four or five people which includes a Peter Pan figure, a girl of noble birth, and a moron, a Forrest Gump of some kind. The prescription thus incorporates an effigy for everyone to identify with. In the old days, we used to destroy the world, and it took only one mad scientist. SF was an act of defiance, a literature of subversion, not whimsy.
Notice Fiedler’s comment on the basic ambivalence which gothic writers feel towards their alienation. Leaving aside Instant Whip SF, one can perceive an ambivalence in science fiction which goes deep—perhaps one should say an ambivalence which is the subject. The emphasis of this ambivalence has changed over the years. Gernsback’s Amazing was decidedly technocratic in bias, and purported to demonstrate how the world’s ills could be solved by increased applications of technology—a reasonable proposition, if a century late—yet large proportions of the fiction concerned experiments etc. which went terribly wrong. Hubris was continually clobbered by nemesis.
Another fundamental ambivalence is less towards technology than towards science itself. Even technology-oriented authors like Arthur C. Clarke show science superseded by or transcended by mysticism and religion; such surely is the meaning of his most famous short story, ‘The Nine Billion Names of God’. It is not science but the fulfilment of religion which brings about the termination of the Universe. The world ends not with a bang but a vesper.
Another ambivalence is the attitude of writers and fans to SF itself. They declare it publicly to be far superior to any possible ‘mimetic’ fiction; yet privately they laugh about it, revel in the worst examples of the art, and boast of how little SF they read.
SF is a function of the Gothic or post-Gothic. So, for that matter, are the novels of Peter Straub, and they also—in such examples as the tantalizingly named Ghost Story—bestraddle customary definitions of the ghost stories and mainstream literature.
What I wish I had altered was the final word of my definition, to have said not ‘mould’ but ‘mode’.
One of the difficulties of defining SF springs from the fact that it is not a genre as such, just as the absurd category ‘Non-fiction’ is not a genre. Taking my cue from Rosemary Jackson,[13] I suggest that our problems in the area of definition will be lightened if we think of SF as a mode. Jackson says, ‘It is perhaps more helpful to define the fantastic as a literary mode rather than a genre, and to place it between the opposite modes of the marvellous and the mimetic’.
This may not help with the question of to what extent SF is a department of fantasy; ‘fantasy’ as a literary term, like ‘classical’ and ‘romantic’, has come through usage to be defaced; but it helps us to appreciate SF as the obverse of the realistic mode, and to see that SF can itself assume various generic forms. There is, for instance, a fairly well-defined category of ‘disaster SF’ and this in itself can be subdivided into cautionary disasters (like 1984) and into what I have termed ‘cosy catastrophes’ (such as The Day of the Triffids), in which the hero ends with the power and the girl, and is personally better off than he was at the beginning. No form which includes more than one genre can itself be a genre.
The relevant dictionary definition of ‘mode’ is ‘A way or manner in which something takes place; a method of procedure’, and ‘A manner or state of being of a thing’.
While my critics argued, as well they might, with the BYS definition of SF, they rarely advanced a more convincing alternative. The same must be said for the response to my proposal for a great SF progenitor.
My search for ancestors went back no further in time than Frankenstein. The wide acceptance of this proposal by academics may have been prompted by relief—a sensible relief occasioned by their therefore not having to teach Gilgamesh, Dante and Otis Adelbert Kline to their classes.
One sees that this argument of origins can never be definitively settled, for conflicting genres have contributed to the modern mode. But it is an argument worth pursuing, just as palaeontologists and others pick over the so far insoluble question of the early origins of mankind.
When first claiming for Frankenstein a pre-eminent role, I intended to put forward an argument, not an avowed truth. In particular, I wished to present a counter-argument to those two entrenched views which claimed either that SF was as ancient as literature itself or that ‘it all began with Gernsback’. Some commentators managed to hold both assumptions at the same time. No names, no pack drill.
Claims for the pre-eminence of Frankenstein had been advanced before I wrote—rather long before, in one case. Rosalie Glynn Grylls’ Mary Shelley: A Biography (1938) is sympathetic to the author, less sympathetic to her most distinguished book. Grylls does, however, say in one of her appendices that it ‘is the first of the Scientific Romances that have culminated in our day in the work of Mr H. G. Wells’. This claim is advanced because of its ‘erection of a superstructure of fantasy on a foundation of circumstantial ‘‘scientific’’ fact’. These remarks are