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 sense. A newer paradigm is not necessarily a better one, however, and the choice between these two alternatives remains a matter of first principles, where the evidence seems susceptible of logically consistent explanation from either point of view. That is, if one considers SF to designate a formal organization—Suvin’s “literature of cognitive estrangement” has of course been by far the most influential formal definition—then it makes just as much sense to find it in classical Greek narratives as in contemporary American ones; and, in addition, it makes sense to say, as Suvin did, that much of what is conventionally called SF is actually something else. But the newer paradigm holds that the labeling itself is crucial to constructing the genre, and would therefore consider “the literature of cognitive estrangement” a specific, late-twentieth-century, academic genre category that has to be understood partly in the context of its opposition to the commercial genre practices Suvin deplored. Suvin’s definition becomes part of the history of SF, not the key to unraveling SF’s confusion with other forms.2
Strong arguments for the logical superiority of the historical over the formal approach to genre theory have been advanced from the perspective of linguistics and on the grounds provided by the vicissitudes of translation.3 Beyond that, I would argue, the historical paradigm is to be preferred because it challenges its students to understand genre in a richer and more complex way, within parameters that are social rather than just literary.4 Confronted, for example, with the controversy over whether such acclaimed pieces as Pamela Zoline’s “The Heat Death of the Universe” (1967) or Karen Joy Fowler’s “What I Didn’t See” (2002) are SF or not, a formalist approach can only ask whether the story is or isn’t a legitimate member of the genre. Does it accomplish “the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition … [in] an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment” (Suvin 375)? Is it a “realistic speculation about possible future events, based solidly on adequate knowledge of the real world, past and present, and on a thorough understanding of the nature and significance of the scientific method” (Heinlein 9)? Is it “modified by an awareness of the universe as a system of systems, a structure of structures” (Scholes 41)?5 Does it explore the impact of technology or scientific discovery on lived experience? And so on. A historical approach to genre would ask instead how and why the field is being stretched to include these texts or defended against their inclusion; how the identification of them as SF challenges and perhaps modifies the accepted meaning of the term (so that questions about form also continue to be part of the conversation, but not on the same terms); what tensions and strategies in the writing and publication and reading of SF prepare for this sort of radical intervention; and what interests are put at stake by it.6
SF has no essence, no single unifying characteristic, and no point of origin. That SF has no point of origin or single unifying characteristic is the Wittgensteinian position Kincaid proposes in “On the Origin of Genre.” The application of Wittgenstein’s thought to the notion of genre that is crucial to Kincaid was first proposed in 1982 in Alistair Fowler’s Kinds of Literature (41–44), an impressively erudite book whose central thesis is that genres are historical and mutable. As Fowler saw, Wittgenstein’s notion of “family resemblance” is enormously suggestive for genre theory because it conceptualizes a grouping not based upon a single shared defining element. In the language game that constructs the category of games, for example, Wittgenstein says, “these phenomena have no one thing in common which makes us use the same word for all,—but … they are related to one another in many different ways…. We see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail.” We extend the concept “as in spinning a thread we twist fibre on fibre. And the strength of the thread does not reside in the fact that some one fibre runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibres” (31–32, sections 65–66).
Another conceptual model for the shape of a genre that has no single unifying characteristic is provided by the notion of the fuzzy set (see Attebery, Strategies, 12–13). A fuzzy set, in mathematics, is one that, rather than being determined by a single binary principle of inclusion or exclusion, is constituted by a plurality of such operations. The fuzzy set therefore includes elements with any of a range of characteristics, and membership in the set can bear very different levels of intensity, since some elements will have most or all of the required characteristics, while others may have only one. In addition, one member of the set may be included by virtue of properties a, b, and c, another by properties d, e, and f, so that any two sufficiently peripheral members of the set need not have any properties in common. It thus results in a conception of the shape of SF very similar to one based on Wittgenstein’s concept of family resemblance. Either model allows SF the kind of scope and variety found in John Clute and Peter Nicholls’s Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.
It seems worth remembering, however, that something like such a fuzzy set was precisely the target of Suvin’s influential intervention in the history of definitions of SF. What Suvin opposed to the wide range of texts included in the category of SF was a precise concept of the genre ruled by what Roman Jakobson called a “dominant”: “the focusing component of a work of art … [that] rules, determines, and transforms the remaining components” (Jakobson 82). The categorical entity constituted by a fuzzy set or family resemblance, from this point of view, simply allows any number of incompatible versions of the textual dominant to operate silently, side by side, producing in the guise of a narrative genre a motley array of texts with no actual formal integrity. That, according to Suvin, was the state of science fiction studies when he proposed his own rigorous formal definition, which directed itself powerfully against the illusion of integrity in a generic field that had allowed itself to be delineated in such a loose manner.
I think that the conceptualization of SF as a fuzzy set generated by a range of definitions remains susceptible to this formalist criticism of indiscriminately lumping together disparate subgenres under a nominal umbrella because it is still ruled by the logic of textual determination, albeit in a far more diffuse way than that demanded by Jakobson’s notion of the textual dominant. A thoroughgoing theorist of the fuzzy set, rather than being pressed to identify the dominant that commands the operation of inclusion
