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On Defining Science Fiction, or Not
Genre Theory, SF, and History
In his groundbreaking 1984 essay “A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre,” Rick Altman could accurately state that “genre theory has up to now aimed almost exclusively at the elaboration of a synchronic model approximating the syntactic operation of a specific genre” (12). Only a few years later, in 1991, Ralph Cohen announced that there had been a paradigm shift in genre theory, in the course of which its dominant project had changed from identifying and classifying fixed, ahistorical entities to studying genres as historical processes (85–87). Yet the impact of that paradigm shift on science fiction studies, while no doubt contributing to the predominantly historical rather than formalist orientation of most scholarly projects these days, has been neither so immediate nor so overpowering as to make entirely clear its implications for conceptualizing the genre and understanding its history. In this chapter I aim to help clarify and strengthen the impact of a historical genre theory on SF studies.
I start from the problem of definition because, although constructing genre definitions is a scholarly necessity, a historical approach to genre seems to undermine any fixed definition. The fact that so many books on SF begin with a more or less extended discussion of the problem of definition testifies to its importance in establishing a framework for constructing the history of the genre, specifying its range and extent, locating its principal sites of production and reception, selecting its canon of masterpieces, and so on.1 Perhaps the scholarly task that best highlights the importance of genre definition is bibliography, where the choice of what titles to include necessarily has to be guided by clearly articulated criteria that often include such definitions.
Yet it seems that the act of definition cannot ever be adequate to the notion of genre as historical process. In his 1999 Film/Genre, Altman argues that “genres are not inert categories shared by all … but discursive claims made by real speakers for particular purposes in specific situations” (101, quoted in Bould and Vint 50). Thus Mark Bould and Sherryl Vint argue, drawing on Altman’s work, that “there is no such thing as science fiction,” by which they mean that “genres are never, as frequently perceived, objects which already exist in the world and which are subsequently studied by genre critics, but fluid and tenuous constructions made by the interaction of various claims and practices by writers, producers, distributors, marketers, readers, fans, critics and other discursive agents” (48). The critical and scholarly act of definition seems reduced, in this conception of the “claims and practices” that constitute the history of the genre, to no more than one among many other “fluid and tenuous constructions.” In fact, the only genre definition—if one can call it that—adequate to the historical paradigm would be a kind of tautology, an assertion that the genre is whatever the various discursive agents involved in its production, distribution, and reception say it is. And indeed statements of that kind consistently come up in discussions of the problem of defining SF, the best-known example being Damon Knight’s gesture of dismissal toward the very attempt at definition—“Science fiction is what we point to when we say it” (“Science Fiction Adventures,” 122; quoted in Clute and Nicholls 314).
In his 2003 essay “On the Origin of Genre,” Paul Kincaid manages to render the tautological affirmation of genre identity into a thoughtful position. Basing his argument on the notion of “family resemblance” in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, Kincaid proposes that we can neither “extract a unique, common thread” that binds together all science fiction texts, nor identify a “unique, common origin” for the genre (415). He concludes that “science fiction is not one thing. Rather, it is any number of things—a future setting, a marvelous device, an ideal society, an alien creature, a twist in time, an interstellar journey, a satirical perspective, a particular approach to the matter of story, whatever we are looking for when we look for science fiction, here more overt, here more subtle—which are braided together in an endless variety of combinations” (416–17). The usefulness of Wittgenstein’s concept of family resemblance for genre theory will bear further discussion a bit later. For now, the important theoretical point with regard to Kincaid’s argument is not only to agree that, according to a historical theory of genre, SF is “any number of things,” but also to note and emphasize that this account of genre definition, like Altman’s and Bould and Vint’s, involves subjects as well as objects. As Jason Mittel argues with respect to television genres, it is not just a question of the properties of the textual objects referred to as “science fiction,” then, but also of the subjects positing the category, and therefore of the motives, the context, and the effects of those subjects’ more or less consciously and successfully executed projects: “Genres are not intrinsic to texts—they are constituted by the processes that some scholars have labeled ‘external’ elements, such as industrial and audience practices. We need to look beyond the text as the locus for genre, locating genres within the complex interrelations between texts, industries, audiences, and historical contexts” (9–10). Or to put it another way, the assertion that SF is “whatever we are looking for when we are looking for science fiction” does not mean anything much unless “we” know who “we” are and why “we” are looking for science fiction.
In what follows I propose to offer an account of the current state of genre theory as it applies to the attempt to say what SF is. The first section will concentrate on conceptualizing what sort of thing a genre is, or isn’t. The second section will then return to the question of how to understand the collective subjects of genre construction. I am arguing, throughout this chapter, that the notorious diversity of definitions of the genre is not a sign of confusion, nor the result of a multiplicity of genres being mistaken for a single one. On the contrary, the identity of SF is constituted by this very web of sometimes inconsistent and competing assertions. The remaining chapters of this book will then turn to the question of what impact this understanding of genre formation should have on the project of writing the history of SF.
Genre as a Historical Process
I am going to make five propositions about SF, each of which could also be reformulated as a thesis about genre per se, constituting what I take to be a fairly noncontroversial but, I hope, useful summary of the historically oriented paradigm of genre theory announced by Cohen and elaborated by Altman, Mittel, and others. The sequence leads from the basic position that genres are historical processes to the point where one can effectively address the questions about the uses and users of SF that occupy the second section of this chapter. The five propositions are
• SF is historical and mutable;
• SF has no essence, no single unifying characteristic, and no point of origin;
• SF is not a set of texts, but rather a way of using texts and of drawing relationships among them;
• SF’s identity is a differentially articulated position in a historical and mutable field of genres;
• attribution of the identity of SF to a text constitutes an active intervention in its distribution and reception.
Let me explain and defend these propositions one at a time.
SF is historical and mutable. Nearly all twentieth-century genre theorists before 1980 would have agreed that the “theory of genres is a principle of order: it classifies literature and literary history not by time or place (period or national language) but by specifically literary types of organization or structure” (Wellek and Warren 226). The newer paradigm, in contrast, considers generic organizations and structures to be just as messily bound to time and place as other literary historical phenomena, albeit with patterns of distribution and temporalities of continuity and discontinuity that may differ quite strongly from those of national traditions or “periods” in Wellek and Warren’s