including not only textual properties but also intertextual relationships and paratextual functions like “labeling.” Such a task would indeed be encyclopedic in scope, but I want to suggest that it would also be futile, because the quasi-mathematical model of the fuzzy set can never make itself adequate to the open-ended processes of history where genre formation and reformation is constantly taking place. In this respect, Wittgenstein’s thinking is better attuned to the historical approach to genre than the notion of the fuzzy set, because “the term ‘language-game’ is meant to call into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life” (Wittgenstein 11, section 23, emphasis in original). Categorization, in this view, is not a passive registering of qualities intrinsic to what is being categorized, but an active intervention in their disposition, and this insistence on agency is what most decisively distinguishes the historical approach to SF from a formalist one.
The term “family resemblance” has its shortcomings, however, when it comes to thinking about the problem of generic origins. Historians of SF are all too fond of proclaiming its moment of birth, whether it be in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), the first issue of Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories (1926), or elsewhere according to one’s geographical and historical emphasis; and the term “family resemblance” encourages the construction of the history of SF as some version of a family tree of descendants from one or more such progenitors.7 It is not quite enough to argue, as Kincaid does, that there is no “unique, common origin” for the genre (415); the collective and accretive social process by which SF has been constructed does not have the kind of coherent form or causality that allows one to talk about origins at all. Even without reference to Wittgenstein’s antiessentialism, the historical approach to genre proposed in Hans-Robert Jauss’s reception theory exposes the logical problem with identifying the moment of origin for a genre insofar as, for Jauss, the notion of genre is based on repetition and is strictly opposed to his notion of originality. In Jauss’s reception theory, there cannot be a first example of a genre, because the generic character of a text is precisely what is repeated and conventional in it. A text can violate established generic expectations, but it can only be said to have established new expectations when other texts, in imitating its strategies, solidify them into the features of a genre. In order for a text to be recognized as having generic features, it must allude to a set of strategies, images, or themes that has already emerged into the visibility of a conventional or at least repeatable gesture. Genre, therefore, is always found in the middle of things, never at the beginning of them.
A model that helps to better conceptualize the absence of origins in a historical approach to genre is Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s notion of the rhizomatic assemblage.8 What Deleuze and Guattari call a “collective assemblage of enunciation” (22) is constituted by “lines of articulation or segmentarity, strata and territories; but also lines of flight, movements of deterritorialization and destratification” (3). It has no center, no “hierarchical modes of communication and preestablished paths, [but rather] the rhizome is an acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying system … without an organizing memory or central automaton, defined solely by a circulation of states” (21). The most important feature of the rhizomatic assemblage in relation to genre theory is that it is an “antigenealogy” that “operates by variation, expansion, conquest, capture, offshoots…. It has neither beginning nor end, but always a middle (milieu) from which it grows and which it overspills” (21). The movement of texts and motifs into and through SF does not confer a pedigree on them, then, but instead merely connects one itinerary to another. The paths that connect those itineraries are not given in the “acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying” structure of the genre, but rather have been and must be constructed by writers, publishers, and readers out of the conjunctures they occupy and the materials at hand.
The notion that SF’s history is one of “variation, expansion, conquest, capture, offshoots” rather than a lineage of ancestors and descendants is nowhere more important than in the study of what, following the hint in the title of Everett Bleiler’s indispensable bibliography, Science-Fiction: The Early Years, I would call early science fiction. Studying the beginnings of the genre is not at all a matter of finding its points of origin but rather of observing an accretion of repetitions, echoes, imitations, allusions, identifications, and distinctions that testifies to an emerging sense of a conventional web of resemblances. It is this gradual articulation of generic recognition, not the appearance of a formal type, that constitutes the history of early SF. Thus, rather than sorting out true SF from the genres in its proximity or trying to find its primal ancestors, it is far more useful to take stock of the way SF gradually comes into visibility in the milieu of late nineteenth-century fantasy, imperial adventure fiction, the romance revival of the 1880s and 1890s in England, the boy scientists of the American dime novel, utopian writing, the future war motif, and so on.9 One is not looking for the appearance of a positive entity but rather for a practice of drawing similarities and differences among texts, which is the point further elaborated by the third proposition.
SF is not a set of texts, but rather a way of using texts and of drawing relationships among them. All those involved in the production, distribution, and consumption of SF—writers, editors, marketing specialists, casual readers, fans, scholars, students—construct the genre not only by acts of definition, categorization, inclusion and exclusion (all of which are important), but also by their uses of the protocols and the rhetorical strategies that distinguish the genre from other forms of writing and reading. John Frow, at the beginning of his excellent and concise 2006 book on genre theory, writes: “I understand genre as a form of symbolic action: the generic organization of language, images, gestures, and sound makes things happen by actively shaping the way we understand the world…. Texts—even the simplest and most formulaic—do not ‘belong’ to genres but are, rather, uses of them” (2). The fact that genre requires “symbolic action” rather than being inherent in the form or content of a text can be illustrated by the way generic difference can reside within verbal identity. Consider the example offered by Samuel R. Delany of applying realist versus SF protocols to the sentence “He turned on his left side,” where the realist reading understands that someone has changed the position of his body, but the SF reading might mean that he has activated the left side of his body by turning on a switch (“Science Fiction and ‘Literature,’” 103). My point is not so much that the SF reading exploits the grammatical and semantic possibilities of the language in a different and richer way, as Delany argued, as that the second reading depends upon the reader’s familiarity with and use of SF conventions—in particular, here, the expectation that the distinction between organism and machine is going to be blurred or violated. Both the writer and the reader of the sentence in its SF sense are using the genre to actively shape their understanding of the world—that is, the world depicted in the text in question, and its relation to both an empirical environment and to other generically constructed worlds (the world of fantasy, the world of comedy, and so on).10
The distinction between a text’s using a genre and its belonging to it also changes the relationship between the individual text and the genre, so that it is no longer one of simple exemplification, where the text stands as a metonym or synecdoche of the genre. The character of genre as “symbolic action” implies that genre is one of the many kinds of codes that, as Roland Barthes pointed out so relentlessly in S/Z, a text activates. Generic hybridity is not a special case, then; any narrative longer than a headline or a joke almost inevitably uses multiple generic conventions and strategies. Distinctions between SF and fantasy typically, if tacitly, acknowledge this fact, since they so often turn upon the status afforded to realist conventions in relation to the rest of the narrative. Because of the way that multiple genres play upon and against one another in individual texts, pigeonholing a text as a member of this or that genre is much less useful than understanding the way it positions itself within a field of generic possibilities.11
SF’s identity is a differentially articulated position in a historical and mutable field of genres. Frow, after postulating the thesis that texts use genres rather than belong to them, goes on to say that the uses of genre in a text
