“economy of genres,” as Frow does here, means to think of the generic codes activated in a text or by a reader as a matter of making choices with values attached to them by virtue of their difference from other possible choices. Such an economy depends crucially on the system of genres in play at a given time and place. Genres—like phonemes and words in Saussure’s lectures on linguistics—are here considered values that signify by virtue of their difference from the other values in their field, and may change or lose their meaning if transposed into a different system. Thus, as Tony Bennett puts it, generic analysis must always take into account “the system of generic differences—conceived as a differentiated field of social uses—prevailing at [a given] time in terms of its influence on both textual strategies and contexts of reception” (108), because every generic choice constitutes what Pierre Bourdieu calls a position-taking with respect to the positions and values that structure the contemporary field of choices. Understanding the dynamics of genre in a given text depends upon being able to understand the field that offers the writer or reader its range of generic possibilities and determines the values attached to them.
Problems of generic economy are absolutely crucial to SF studies in two ways, the first having to do with questions of prestige and the second with writing the genre’s history. Roger Luckhurst has written very entertainingly about SF’s “death wish,” which is to say its desire to stop being SF and become “literature.” The source of that desire is the way positions and values line up in the contemporary economy of genres to produce the negative connotations often attached to “genre fiction”: “The paradigmatic topography of ghetto/mainstream marks a border on which is transposed the evaluations popular/serious, low/high, entertainment/Literature…. The only way, it is proposed, to legitimate SF is to smuggle it across the border into the ‘high.’ And for the genre as a whole to become legitimate paradoxically involves the very destruction of the genre” (Luckhurst, “Many Deaths,” 37–38). The conceit of the death wish actually refers to something rather different from an instinctual drive, of course—the fact that, although one can make choices (in this case, about genre), one can choose only from the options that history makes available. Many scholars (and editors, writers, and readers) of SF would like to have their SF and their literature too, but that is an option that the distinction between high and low culture has tended to foreclose.
The obsession with definite boundaries that once abounded in discussions of genre rested not on a widespread desire for precision in making genre distinctions, but rather on the effects of prestige attached to positions in the contemporary genre system; and this is the source of the recurrent drawing and redrawing of SF’s borders that Luckhurst writes about. The fact that genre boundaries are so frequently described as prescriptive and constricting derives, similarly, not from their really being that way, but rather from the fact that in modern Western artistic practices more prestige accrues to violating these boundaries than to conforming to them. Hence the concept of “literature” as such has repeatedly been formulated as the category where every work constructs its own unique genre (e.g., by Friedrich Schlegel, Benedetto Croce, and Maurice Blanchot; see Frow, Genre, 26–27, and Altman, Film/Genre, 4–7). What this understanding of “literature” puts at stake is much less the prescriptive force of generic boundaries than the play of expectation and surprise in a text’s handling of them, as in the stark opposition in Jauss’s reception theory between innovative strategies and the understanding of genre itself as a set of predictable and eventually worn-out conventions. Yet, although distinctions between high and low modes of narrative can be expected to exist wherever class differences attach themselves to the production and distribution of narratives—which is to say throughout history—the particular way that high and low are connected in contemporary genre practices with innovation versus imitation is a more recent and specific development. The peculiar sense of “literature” as the category whose members defy categorization is an integral part of the history of the sense of “genre” that is one of SF’s conditions of existence. Thus writing the history of SF has to involve, at a minimum, attending to the historical change in genre systems that produced that distinction.
The way generic terms and choices signify in relation to other terms and choices is constantly in flux. Thus, as Fowler says, “It is neither possible nor even desirable to arrive at a very high degree of precision in using generic terms. The overlapping and mutability of genres means that an ‘imprecise’ terminology is more efficient” (130). Such overlapping and mutability also make necessary the practice of retro-labeling in order to trace the lineaments of emerging genre categories (hence, “early science fiction”). Nonetheless, attention to the history of genre systems ought to foreclose the option of transposing the category of SF wholesale onto early modern or classical texts. If Shelley’s Frankenstein was not SF when it was written (see chapter 3), neither, a fortiori, were Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels or Lucian’s True History. The important point is that the emergence of SF has to do not with the first appearance of a certain formal type, nor with when the term “science fiction” was first used or by whom, but rather with the appearance of a system of generic identities that articulates the various terms that cluster around SF (scientific fiction, scientific romance, scientifiction; but also horror fiction, detective fiction, the western). Clearly Gernsback did not initiate this system of generic identities when he published the first issue of Amazing Stories in 1926. But just as clearly, the milieu of mass-marketed periodical publications is one of the historical conditions for SF’s emergence as a distinctive genre, and that milieu carries with it its hierarchical opposition to a specific version of the realm of “high” culture.
I propose that understanding the positions and values of SF within past and present economies of genre, or how the history of this shifting and slippery subject, science fiction or SF, fits into the larger context of changes within the system of genres, is the frame in which to put the question, What difference does it make when “we” point to a text and say that it is SF?
The answer to that question from the perspective of genre theory is that attribution of the identity of SF to a text constitutes an active intervention in its distribution and reception. Here we should speak of labeling itself as a rhetorical act. One of the most bustling areas of genre theory in recent years has been that explored by rhetoricians focused on the pedagogy of composition, rather than critics and scholars of literature (Frow, “‘Reproducibles,’” 1626–27). In an important early contribution to the new rhetorical approach to genre, Carolyn Miller wrote in 1984 that a “sound definition of genre must be centred not on the substance or the form of discourse but on the action it is used to accomplish” (151). Miller is primarily concerned with “the ‘de facto’ genres, the types we have names for in everyday language,” because these genres “tell us something theoretically important about discourse” by “tak[ing] seriously the rhetoric in which we are immersed and the situations in which we find ourselves” (155). Although her analysis is therefore more concerned with genres like the letter of recommendation or the inaugural speech than with drawing distinctions between different types of storytelling, Miller’s approach to genre might well lead one to ask why distinctions between types of story are drawn and insisted upon at all. How can one explain this “mutual construing of objects, events, interests, and purposes that not only links them but makes them what they are: an objectified social need” (157)? What action does it accomplish to attribute the label, SF, to a narrative?
Whatever protocols of interpretation or formal and thematic conventions the label refers to, the labeling itself often serves to position the text within the field of choices offered by the contemporary genre system in quite material ways: how it will be printed, where it will be sold, by whom it is most likely to be read. Generic attribution therefore affects the distribution and reception of texts—that is, the ways they are put to use. It is a way of telling someone how to read a text, and even more a kind of promise that the text can be usefully, pleasurably read that way. The attribution does not just classify the text; it promotes its use by a certain group of readers and in certain kinds of ways (e.g., with a high level of seriousness, or a lack of it). When “we” point to a story and say it is SF, therefore, that means not only that it ought to
