1 is a minimally revised version of an essay published in Science Fiction Studies in 2010 under the same title. It is devoted to basic issues of genre theory in relation to the problem of defining the genre of SF. Chapter 2 picks up the theoretical issues of chapter 1 in order to elaborate a description of the mass cultural genre system as a whole. The rest of the chapters explore some problems in writing the history of SF based on the theoretical groundwork laid in the first two chapters. Chapter 3 takes up the question of generic origins by arguing that the genealogy of SF is better approached in terms of systemic changes than the influence of individual texts. Chapter 4 is devoted to the issue of SF’s status within the traditional literary canon via an extended reading of the novels of Philip K. Dick. Chapters 5 and 6 turn to more recent SF to examine some of the effects of homogeneity and heterogeneity corresponding to the genre’s mass cultural and subcultural communities of practice. Here, as in the chapter on Dick, I am also concerned with the kind of critical and anti-hegemonic power SF narratives often exercise. This critical power does not depend on SF’s formal grammar, but rather on the way some narratives appropriate and recode the genre’s resources. I am especially concerned in chapters 5 and 6 with their doing so in order to resist a given subculture’s inclusion within, and often erasure by, mass cultural homogeneity. In the conclusion I offer a periodization of SF’s history that attempts to support the claim, argued throughout the book, that the cultural and ideological power of SF is best understood when questions about it are set in the systemic context of its dialogue with other proximate genres and the tension between different genre systems based on their different venues and modes of publicity.
1
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
