roger luckhurst- the many deaths of science fiction- a polemic

7/28/2019 Roger Luckhurst- The Many Deaths of Science Fiction- A Polemic

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Science Fiction Studies

#62 = Volume 21, Part 1 = March 1994

Roger Luckhurst

The Many Deaths of Science

Fiction: A Polemic

How many times can a genre die? How oen

can the death sentence be passed down, andwhen do repeated stays of execution cease

being moments of salvation and become

instead sadistic toying with the condemned?

SF is dying; but then SF has always been

dying, it has been dying from the very

moment of its constitution. Birth and death

become transposable: if Gernsbacks pulp

genericism produces the gheo and the

pogrom of systematic starvation for some, he

also names the genre and gives birth to it for

others. If the pulps eventually give us the

Golden Age, its passing is death for some

and re-birth for others. If the New Wave is the

life-saving injection, it is also a spiked drug, a

perversion, and the onset of a long

degeneration towards inevitable death. If the

1970s is a twilight, a long terminal lingering,

the feminists come to the rescue. But then thefeminists are also partially responsible,

Charles Pla argues, for issuing one final

vicious twist of the knife. And what of

cyberpunk? Dead before it was even bornor

rather dead because it was named. Requiem

for the Cyberpunks aims to finally kill the

label (5). And what now? Christina Sedgewick

asks Can Science Fiction Survive in

Postmodern, Megacorporate America? A newdecline, or rather a circling back: SF dying

because of its re-commercialization. This is

also the thrust of Charles Plas claim that we

find ourselves wedded to a form that was once

provocative and stimulating but is now

http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/62/luckhurst62art.htm


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find ourselves wedded to a form that was once

provocative and stimulating but is now

crippled, corrupt, mentally retarded, and dying

for lack of intensive care (45).

This is a parodic history, no doubt, and yet it

seems integral to any putative history thatSF is haunted by its own death, that it

constantly passes through this state of

terminal disease. Why? Is this unanswerable?

In this I am echoing Derridas speculation on

philosophy at the opening of his essay

Violence and Metaphysics:

That philosophy died

yesterday...and

philosophy should stillwander towards the

meaning of its deathor

that it has always lived

knowing itself to be

dying...; that philosophy

died one day, within

history, or that it has

always fed on its own

agony ...; that beyond the

death, or dying nature ofphilosophy, thought still

has a future, or even, as is

said today, is still entirely

to come because of what

philosophy has held in

store...all these are

unanswerable questions.

(79)

Is SF also only surviving, dwindling in its last

days, or paradoxically living on aer its death?

And is this the fast-fading ghost or the

longed-for re-birth? Is it, like philosophy,

living on, an SF aer-living SF? And yet

unlike philosophy, there is no determinable

phase of life: its death is there from the

beginning. SF indeed seems to be always

feeding on its own agony. In what follows, I

want to analyze the narrative of death integral

to SF and perhaps aempt to answer thepuzzling question of its constant, haunting

presence in critical considerations of the

genre. It is my polemical proposal that these

regularly issued panic narratives, these

a ocal tic warnin s and calls to arms in fact



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regularly issued panic narratives, these

apocalyptic warnings and calls to arms, in fact

conceal the opposite concern: that SF wants to

die, that it is ecstatic at the prospect of its own

death and desires nothing else.

As a way of entry, let me begin with the workof J.G. Ballard. There has been a systematic

re-vision of Ballards work in recent years. His

uneasy relation to the genre was initially

figured in terms of his unrelenting pessimism,

his perversion of the teleological narrative of

scientific progress so central to hard SF.

Blish objected to the passivity in Ballards

disaster novels: you are under absolutely no

obligation to do anything about it but sit andworship it (128). Peter Nicholls condemned

Ballards oeuvre outright: Ballard is

advocating a life style quite likely to involve

the sudden death of yourself and those you

love (31). Ballards nihilism is exemplified by

his obsessive representations of mutilation,

suicidal passivity, and the embrace, the

positive willing, of death. One interpretive

possibility remains: that the disaster novelsfocus on the perverse desires, mad ambitions,

and suicidal manias of aberrant personalities

now free to fulfill fatal aspirations devoid of

any rational motivation (Barlow 32).

However, the re-vision began with Ballards

dismissal of this false reading:

I dont see my fiction as

disaster-oriented...theyre...stories

of psychic fulfillment.

The geophysical changes

which take place in The

Drought, The Drowned

World, and The Crystal

World are all positive and

good changes...[that] lead

us to our real

psychological goals....

Really, Im trying to show

a new kind of logic

emerging, and this is to

be embraced, or at least

held in regard. (Pringle

and Goddard, 40)



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held in regard. (Pringle

and Goddard, 40)

Peter Brigg and Warren Wagar have

subsequently offered the inverted perspective

and perverse argument that the literal

catastrophe is metaphorically transvaluedinto positive narratives of psychic

transcendence: that these are fables of self-

overcoming in perilous confrontation with the

world (Wagar, 56). Gregory Stevenson, in Out

of the Nightmare and into the Dream, has taken

this position to its most religiose extreme: all

of Ballards work is to be encoded into a

pseudo-Jungian-Christian mish-mash of

transcendence. Death as the terminus, asliminal facticity and the problematic of

finitude, is to be re-figured as the metaphorical

transgression of the bounds of the bodily into

an ultimate, ecstatic (re-)unification and (re-)

integration.

In adjudicating on these competing frames,

death is undoubtedly pivotal. The issue comes

down to whatform of death the Ballardian text

proposes. Clearly the narrative oftranscendence is aempting to shi from the

wrong (literal) death to the right

(metaphorical) death. Being-towards-death is

replaced by Being-beyond-death. But it is not

as simple as this straightforward substitution

of deaths suggests. There is a certain violence

in trying to elide Ballards oeuvre into a

singular narrative, which tends to erase

important differences between The DrownedWorld and The Crystal World, where textual

evidence for transcendence is clear, and The

Drought, which is more rigorously existential

in concentrating on what Jaspers would call

the unreadable and unaainable cipher-

script of the Transcendent.1 Such a narrative

is also uncomfortable with The Atrocity

Exhibition where the concern for violence and

death is displaced onto the figure of theWoman. It is also useful, I think, to retain

Ballards clear debt to Freuds speculations on

the literal fact of human aggressivity and

violence in Civilization and Its Discontents,2

especially as it is central to the book which so



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violence in Civilization and Its Discontents,2

especially as it is central to the book which so

influenced Ballard, Bernard Wolfes Limbo.3

It needs re-emphasizing that the literal and

figural readings of death are inextricable and

intertwined; transcendence of the bodilyclearly depends on the facticity of the body in

order to have any productive meaning. Why is

this so important? Because in terms of SF

criticism this re-visioning of Ballard forms a

kind of meta-commentary on the project of

legitimating SF as a whole genre.

Elsewhere I have argued that the araction of

postmodernism for SF critics is its apparent

transgressive aesthetic, its erasure of the

borders between disciplines, discursive

regimes, and crucially for SF the boundary

between the high and the low. With

postmodernism, it would appear, the gheo

walls of the popular can be dismantled and SF

can (re)join the mainstream of fiction, no

longer being equated with the embarrassing

and degrading label of popular genre fiction.

The longing for (re)entry to the mainstreamis the enduring central element of SF criticism.

Ballards texts in effect perform this desire

figured both as literal death (of genre) into a

transcendent unity (with the mainstream). In

The Voices of Time, the language of

Powerss dissolution is crucial: he felt his

body gradually dissolving, its physical

dimensions melting into a vast continuum of

the current, which bore him out into thecentre of the great channel, sweeping him

onward, beyond hope but at last at rest

(39-40). This is the literal entry into the main

stream. Indeed, rather than criticism reading

Ballard, Ballards text could be seen to read

and expose the fantasy of criticism: release

from the bondedness of genre into the

undivided stream of Literature. One could

read the texts evocative description of the

terminal lapse into narcoma as the death

throes of generic SF and this final vision as

the ecstatic release, the abandonment of

generic boundaries. In Derridas terms, Ballard

exposes the generic law by performing that



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gener c oun ar es. n err a s erms, a ar

exposes the generic law by performing that

very law: SF is marked by, and Ballard

re-marks, the genres desire for its own death.

This might seem a provocative and peculiarly

perverse argument, but I intend to

demonstrate that this fantasy of death is

crucial to how SF critics legitimate SF as a

genre. It is vital to emphasize that this

death-wish is the result of the structure of

legitimation. The paradigmatic topography of

gheo /mainstream marks a border on which

is transposed the evaluations popular/serious,

low/high, entertainment/Literature.4 One

might expect SF critics to formulate evaluative

criteria specific to the site of SF and thegeneric. However SF critics tend to take their

criteria from the high and then proceed to

denigrate SF in its relational, constructed

position as low, as failing to achieve

literary standards. That this topography is

imposed by largely invisible and unexamined

categories of worth (the evaluative

designations of high, as I demonstrate

below, are the products of an historicalmoment) is le unquestioned. 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.

Before the tribunal of the high, SF

legitimates itself in three ways: by the

implementation of internal borders; by a

certain narrative of its (in/ glorious) history;

and by the appeal to the rigor of the scientific.

The first two apply for citizenship in

Literature, whilst the laer claims partial guilt

on the grounds of diminished responsibility.

And one could polemically argue that these, in

very different ways, all propose a form of

death.

SF critics oen want to make grand claims for

the genre. For Scholes and Rabkin, it create[s]

a modern conscience for the human race (vii);

it fits, indeed supersedes, the great humanistic

claims for literature as a whole. At the same



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it fits, indeed supersedes, the great humanistic

claims for literature as a whole. At the same

time, and on the same page, they are equally

aware that SF is constituted out of trivial,

ephemeral works of popular fiction which is

barely literate, let alone literary. Most of the

subsequent work of their text is dedicated toaffirming these two contradictory statements

by separating them out, divorcing them from

each other as distinct and pure sites within

SF. An internal border is constituted whereby,

on the one hand, the grand claim is asserted

and so entry to Literature can be gained,

whilst on the other, SF can, in alliance with

the categories of the legitimate, be

condemned.

Scholes and Rabkin justify their own critical

text on the basis that SF has ceased to be

wholly popular now that a sufficient number

of works of genuine merit have been wrien

from within it (vii). The logic of legitimation

through the implementation of internal

boundaries can be stated thus: SF is a popular

genre which yet contains within it a

movement of profundity; in order to secure

that serious element a mark, a line of

division, must be approved, by which the

gheo can be transcended. If, as Darko Suvin

insists, The genre has to be evaluated

proceeding from the heights down, applying

the standards gained by the analysis of its

masterpieces (Poetics 71), and yet these very

heights transcend the genre, such texts could

be said to no longer belong to SF. SF-which-is-not-SF is the apotheosis and judge of SF.

The internal border is usually implemented at

the site of the definition. It involves isolating a

central definition through which all other

cases can be rejected or shied to the edges as

impure. These marginalia are, unsurprisingly,

identical with precisely the elements that

might mark the genre as popular; their

displacement de-contaminates it of the pulp,

leaving the serious works as the central

representatives of the genre. Darko Suvin is

the exemplar of this strategy. SF as cognitive

estrangement defamiliarizes the empirical



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t e exemp ar o t s strategy. as cogn t ve

estrangement defamiliarizes the empirical

environment by foregrounding the artificiality

of its natural norms. This cognitive utility of

SF is based on the rigor of applying scientific

laws; such worlds must be possible. Suvin

presents a definition that appeals to thespecificity of hard SFwhich is also asserted

by Scholes in Structural Fabulation, Charles

Pla, and many others. The law of science,

however, superimposes on the law of genre;

this strict definition is the basis for a

wholesale deportation of categories which

surround, indeed interpenetrate inextricably,

SF. Hence SF retrogressing into fairy tale...is

commiing creative suicide (Poetics 62);

fantasy is a sub-literature of mystification

(Poetics 63). What is truly astonishing in

Suvins system is his dismissal of virtually all,

if not all, SF in itself. Narrative Logic,

Ideological Domination and the Range of SF

draws a fan-shaped diagram, in which the

boom point, the convergence of the range, is

marked as the optimum SF. Above it are

borderlines marking good and most SF.

This most is debilitating confectionery,and, he asserts, there is only one ideal

optimum (Positions 70). Is the ideal here a

Platonic one? Does it imply that the optimum

is unaainable in fact? Those falling short of

this ideal are discussed under the titles

banal, incoherent, dogmatic, and

invalidated: all uses of SF as prophecy,

futurology, program or anything else claiming

ontological factuality for the SF image-clusters, are obscurantist and reactionary at

the deepest level (Positions 71).

Suvins final and deathly judgments are

proscriptions which result from the desperate

desire to decontaminate and inoculate SF. If

the rigor of his definitionalism is an aempt to

isolate a singular utility for SF, it is also a logic

that prescribes a death. The cordon sanitaire of

legitimacy constricts so far as to annihilate SF.

Suvins writings on the history of SF are more

valuable than this harsh imposition of

borders, yet in some senses they are also

exem lar of the strate ies of le itimation that



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borders, yet in some senses they are also

exemplary of the strategies of legitimation that

operate in the histories of SF. SF history serves

two functions: that of embedding SF in the

mainstream (the historical erasure of the

boundary) and of serving to eliminate, or at

least displace, the illicit site of the naming of

SFAmerica. This narrative can be

parodically summarized in the following way:

once there was an Edenic time when SF swam

with the mainstream, was inseparable and

unidentifiable from it; then came the

Americans who walled it up and issued a

proclamation of martial law. This is the

self-imposition of the gheo, the 40 years

(rather than days) in the wilderness (seeMerril, 54). This narrative ends prophetically:

there will come a time when the walls will be

demolished, when SF will rejoin the

mainstream and cease its disreputable

existence. Conclusions to such histories are

the sites where the longing for death becomes

most explicit.

Historical legitimations can in fact begin inprehistory; SF is merely a modernized version

of the innately human need for mythology

by which to orient experience. The biological

need for SF is asserted by Scholes, who argues

that the desire for narrative, once satisfied by

myth, can now be provided by popular forms,

given the decadence and abandonment of

narrative by the mainstream. This explains

why normally respectable readers resort

secretly and guiltily to lesser forms for that

narrative fix they cannot do without (Roots

53). SF, it is seemingly argued here, is

restoring an imbalance afflicted by the loss of

narrative (the language of chemical

compulsion is also used by Kingsley Amis,

although in a different context: SF is an

addiction which is mostly contracted in

adolescence or not at all [16]). The more

properly historical mode, however, aempts toembed and entwine SF into the mainstream.

Legitimation comes from appropriating, say,

Swi, Thomas More or Lucian to SF; history

saves the illegitimate child by discovering its

true arenta e. This is a fascinatin strate :



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saves the illegitimate child by discovering its

true parentage. This is a fascinating strategy:

it is not the aempt to find a fixed identity or

essence of SF; it is concerned precisely with

constructing a non-origin, to disperse it, to

deny specificity. SF does not begin anywhere

as such, and the disreputable generic can be

displaced to become a mere bit-part in a larger

historical unfolding.

The suppression involved is that of a name:

Gernsback. I am not suggesting that the origin

of SF lies with him, but his originating of the

site is crucial. Gernsback is ritually vilified: for

Aldiss, he was one of the worst disasters ever

to hit the science fiction field (63); for Blish,he is solely responsible for gheoization (118);

for Clareson, he initiated the abandonment of

literature to propagandize for technology

(20); for Merril, the 40 years in the wilderness

begins in 1926 with Amazing. What follows is

a movement either backwards to predate a

baleful influence, or forward to celebrate his

supersession. The aempt at erasure,

however, cannot ignore Gernsbacks initial

elaboration of the conditions on which the

genre has come to be defined: to publish only

such stories that have their basis in scientific

laws as we know them, or the logical

deduction of new laws from what we know

(scientific rigor/extrapolation); that the fictions

would supply knowledge...in a very palatable

form (legitimation through educative

rolealso seen by Janice Radway to be a

crucial mode in which women readers of

popular romance fiction legitimate their

reading); the grand claim for its cultural

significancePosterity will point to [the SF

story] as having blazed a new trail, not only in

literature and fiction, but progress as well (my

emphasis).5 These have all been widely used

subsequently.Amazingwas also instrumental

in constructing a community through reader

participation. Whether seen positively ornegatively, SF as a genre can only be

understood with reference to where its

conventions and limits were inscribed, despite

the constant aempt to displace it.



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the constant aempt to displace it.

It might seem to be the most naive SF

historiography to mark Gernsback as the

initiator; naming, however, is different from

origin. Gernsback did not appear sui generis.

The constitution of the site of the specific SFmagazine in the 1920s was a product of some

40 years of socio-cultural re-alignments

around the literary. H.G. Wells has been

cited as both the progenitor of generic SF and

the last instance of an SF text being accepted

into an undifferentiated field of Literature

before the gheoization effected by

Gernsback. This is inaccurate, however; the

laer decades of the 19th century were thecrucial phase of the development of the

categories of the high and low as they now

operate institutionally. This is an incredibly

complex moment in the construction of

cultural value in, as Peter Keating observes, a

publishing field that had explosively

expanded into a bewildering diversity. The

popular or low was not simply the

demonized Other, the defining negative, of an

emergent Modernism;6 moral panic over the

links between penny dreadfuls and

working-class criminality had developed in

the 1870s (see Bristow). If Thomas Wright had

divided the high from the low in 1881, and 20

years later the Times Literary Supplementwas

set up to distinguish the beer authors from

the rubbish heap of incompetence, 7 it

should not be forgoen that there was an

equally belligerent assertion for the moral

superiority of the re-vivified Romance.

Largely in the pages of The Contemporary

Review, Andrew Lang, Rider Haggard, and

others aacked the effete etiolation of the

modern serious novel and argued for the

muscular romance or adventure story.

Against the diseased interiority of the

analytic novel, the romance deliberately

reverted to the simpler instead of morecomplicated kind of novel, and, in an

inversion that prefigures Scholess aempt to

displace the mainstream, Saintsbury also

argued that romance is of its nature eternal

and reliminar to the novel. The novel is of



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,

argued that romance is of its nature eternal

and preliminary to the novel. The novel is of

its nature transitory and parasitic on the

romance (415-16). Literary histories tend to

emphasize this late Victorian phase as the

construction of the Modernist Art-work in

opposition to the now degraded low. It was

also, just as significantly, the moment in

which the sites (increasingly low priced,

increasingly specialized fiction magazines),

terminology (Wright entitled his essay

Popular Fiction in 1881; bestseller was

coined in 1889), and the very forms and genres

of the modern concept of popular literature

were founded.

Two things require clarification about this in

relation to SF. Firstly, it cannot be said that

texts that could be nominated as SF at that

time existed in an undifferentiated

mainstream; the very spaces in which they

found publication were products of a rapidly

fragmenting concept of fiction, quickly

becoming figured in terms of civilized high

and degenerate low.8

Wellss anxiety todepart from being identified solely with the

scientific romance and his deference (at least

in their leers) to Henry James mark his

awareness of the emerging equation between

the popular and the degenerate. Secondly,

the very use of the term SF is already a

retrospective extraction of texts out of a mass

of romances. Cross-fertilizations between

juvenile adventure stories, imperialist

narratives, Gothic revivalism, and the

supernatural, as well as pseudo-scientific

adventures deriving either from simple

technological advance or sociological

inflections of Darwin have been traced by

Patrick Brantlinger and Judith Wilt. A text like

Jekyll and Hyde could be said to be premised

on a scientific novum, but it is equally

overdetermined by Gothic, melodramatic, and

imperialist elements; this is no less the casefor Wells. Even if this was the moment in

which modern popular genres gradually

emerged (in the sense of specialist sites,

formulated conventions, formulated plots, and

reader coteries SF was a relativel late



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,

formulated conventions, formulated plots, and

reader coteries), SF was a relatively late

development in relation to the detective genre,

the spy novel, or even the Western. As

Andrew Ross notes, even the pulp term

science fiction had to fight, in the 1920s, for

predominance amongst other magazines

publishing what were variously termed

pseudo-science, weird science, off-trail, or

fantascience fiction (415). What must be

asserted here concerns two stages: that SF is

elaborated as a distinct genre only with

Gernsbacks and other subsequent specialist

magazines, and that its pre-history is one of

fundamental impurity. This impurity, however,

does not mark an undif-ferentiatedmainstream, but is an impurity within the

emerging concept of the popular.

It seems vital that this material production of

spaces for the constitution of the modern

popular be addressed; SF histories, however,

either pass over it in the search for legitimate

parentage or mark it as the precarious latency

of gheoization.9

Notions of impurity alsocontravene the operation of internal borders.

Sourcesa historical continuity that would

embed SF in the mainstreamare sought that

would manipulate an isomorphism of method

between the legitimate and the generic: utopic

estrangement, say, or extrapolative rigor. And

yet it is plain that the aempts to claim Swi

or More as SF can only be retrospective ones;

they are only SF insofar as they intersect

with generic conventions. Such histories have

to arrive (and then pass over) the moment of

the historical constitution of the pulps

because SF as a demarcation is only

comprehensible in relation to them. Even if

More and Swi historically predate, in the

internal temporality of the genre they can only

arrive subsequently into the arms of an SF

genre determined aer they were wrien.

The SF history strenuously seeks to elaborate

a fantasy of non-origin, of being

indistinguishable, identical, to the

mainstream: in such narratives of

embedding SF into a larger historical



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mainstream: in such narratives of

embedding SF into a larger historical

unfolding there is clearly a desire to return to

an earlier state of things, before the genre

divide, before the boundary of high and low.

To restore an earlier stage of things: this is how

Freud formulates the death instinct in Beyondthe Pleasure Principle. The pleasure principle

operates according to an economy of

stabilization: excitation causes imbalance and

disturbance; this energy is bound and

neutralized. Prior to this, Freud hypothesizes,

are instincts which do not belong to the type

of bound nervous processes but of freely

mobile processes which press towards

discharge (306). The instincts are notconcerned with a homeostatic economy, but

seek to entirely evacuate from the organism:

It seems, then, that an instinct is an urge

inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state

of things (308)that state being the inorganic,

the inanimate: death. This first instinct is

seeking a quick return to the organic state;

however, external stimuli keep arriving to

disrupt this path of return to the immanentproper death. External influences oblige the

still surviving substance to diverge ever more

widely from its original course of life and to

make ever more complicated detours before

reaching its aim of death (311). Life is in fact

merely the result of the detours enforced by

external stimuli, and the threat of returning

to inorganic existence other than those which

are immanent in the organism itself. Freud

can thus state: the aim of all life is death

(311).

Peter Brooks has already proposed Freuds

essay as a model for the process of reading: for

the classic realist text at least, the opening of

the novel causes excitation which the text

then aempts to expel, to return to zero, at the

close. To finish, to complete the text, is to

restore an earlier state of things. Narrative is,in effect, the detour between two states of

quiescence: The desire of the text (the desire

of reading) is hence desire for the end, but

desire for the end reached only through the

least minimally complicated detour, the



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desire for the end reached only through the

least minimally complicated detour, the

intentional deviance, in tension, which is the

plot or narrative (292). But this is also the

desire of SF as a genre. Placing generic SF in a

historical trajectory, in which there is no origin

or name or site of SF, sees the imposition ofthe gheo as an intolerable blockage to

energy which is seeking absolute discharge,

the return to zero. The history of the genre is

the history of the aempt to die in the proper

way. This gives a new importance to the

question of whether it is the right or wrong

death represented in Ballards disaster

novels; it also questions the more Jungian

interpretations of his texts as movementstowards wholeness and plenitude. That

Powers constructs a huge Mandala at the

center of which he finally transcends his body

can be taken as a Jungian image; equally the

circular mandala could be seen to draw a zero,

a figure which is the precise opposite of

plenitude, signaling rather emptiness,

nothing, the return of the inorganic. This is

the double-edged death of SF, as literal

destruction and metaphorical transcendence:

the return to the mainstream.

The history of SF is a history of ambivalent

deaths. The many movements within the

genrethe New Wave, feminist SF,

cyberpunkare marked as both transcendent

death-as-births, finally demolishing the

gheo walls, and as degenerescent birth-

as-deaths, perverting the specificity of thegenre. To be elevated above the genre is a

transcendent death and the birth of Literature,

but as these movements harden, coalesce, are

named, they fall back as subgeneric moments

of SF. They become detours on the road to the

proper death of SF.

History as the passage between two

equivalent states of quiescence displays,

evidently, that birth and death become

interchangeable. If the projection back, as a

fantasy of non-origin, is SFs past, its

complement in the future is the fantasy of

non-being. This is the circular detour back



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comp emen n e u ure s e an asy o

non-being. This is the circular detour back

into the mainstream where the fantasy of

non-origin had situated it before the

interregnum of the generic. The most

enthusiastic claims for approaching non-being

came with the New Wave. The explosion ofthe New Wave was the explosion of the genre

itself. Aldiss senses a rapprochement with

the mainstream, the return from the gheo of

Retarded Boyhood and asserts Science

Fiction per se does not exist (306-07). Scholes

and Rabkin end their history with the

problematic place of Ballard and Vonnegut:

A writer like Vonnegut forces us to consider

the impending disappearance of the category

upon which a book like this depends... science

fiction will not exist (98-99). The introduction

to Harlan Ellisons Dangerous Visions evokes

two deaths: that of the Golden Age being

superseded by science itself, and that of the

New Wave, which has been found, has been

termed good by the mainstream, and is now in

the process of being assimilated.... Science

fiction is dead (xxii).

That death is so central to the history of SF,

that death propels the genre is, I must insist

again, the effect of the structure of

legitimation: SF is a genre seeking to bury the

generic, aempting to transcend itself so as to

destroy itself as the degraded low. The third

strategy of legitimation, however, that

promoting the rigor of the scientific,

apparently refuses this deference to themainstream. Nevertheless, it posits its own

kind of death.

Robert Heinleins definition of SF as 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, allows

him a rigorous future projection, oneprediction of which is the disappearance of

the cult of the phony in art.... so-called

modern art will be discussed only by

psychiatrists (Worlds 22, 17). Contemporary

literature is sick, wrien b neurotics...sex



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psychiatrists (Worlds 22, 17). Contemporary

literature is sick, wrien by neurotics...sex

maniacs...the degraded, the psychotic

(Science Fiction 42). The poles are inverted,

as are imputed pathologies. One suspects,

however, that this adversarial disrespect is a

defensively aggressive response to

illegitimacy.

Legitimation by science continually fails by its

own allegedly rigorous demands. If Heinlein

places a border between SF and fantasy by

declaring that fantasy is any story based on

violation of scientific fact, such as space ship

stories which ignore ballistics (Science

Fiction 19), his point that time-travel storiesare legitimate because we know almost

nothing about the nature of time is

exceedingly weak. The depressing litany of

rejections and exclusions of certain texts

because their science doesnt work (as

Aldiss chastises Ballard [Wounded 128])

insists on a purity that, by the very standards

of the science it invokes to judge, fails. The

science element of SF is of interest, in fact,

exactly as it fails, as it misses rigor; as

Andrew Ross maintains, Gernsback and

Campbells claim to be at the cuing edge of

science is not so much anachronistic as

mediated and ideological. The adherence to a

positivistic, technocratic science was

scientifically outdated but politically current:

the populism of technological futurism, the

scientist as social engineer. Stableford is right,

I think, to assert that the rhetoric of scientificrigor was a crucial palliative for early SF:

What seems to have been essential is the

illusion of fidelity to science and responsibility

to the principles of logical extrapolation,

probably because it is this illusion that

permits...the suspension of disbelief which

allows the reader to participate in the fiction

by identifying with its endeavour (59).

Science must miss its mark, because to beaccurate is to risk destruction. With a

ceaseless regularity in this mode of

legitimation, the name of Cleve Cartmill is

invoked. Cartmills atom-bomb story,

Deadline, published in Astounding in 1944,



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invoked. Cartmills atom-bomb story,

Deadline, published in Astounding in 1944,

was deemed to be so accurate with respect to

the research program of the Manhaan Project

that the FBI raided Astoundings offices. The

frequent appearance of the anecdote indicates

its utility for claiming the scientific accuracyand importance of SF. This may be true, but it

also marks a death. Cartmills fiction was

overtaken within a year; it survives only as an

anecdote, not as a read text. There is a sense,

in the insistence on scientific rigor, that SF is

fighting a limited shelf-life: one danger

threatening science fiction is that the progress

of science itself answers so many questions

raised by science fiction, thereby removingone idea aer another (de Camp, 128-29).

This may be banal, or trivializing of SFs

vitality in its consistent confrontations with

contemporaneous technological issues.

However, the scientific legitimation aims to

sidestep the claims of the mainstream on the

ownership of the proper text through

another, far more important strategy: Even if

every work were on the lowest literary

level...the form would still retain much of its

significancefor the significance...lies more in

its aitudes [the scientific method], in its

intention, than in the perfection of its detail

(Bretnor, 287). This retreat, this surrender of

fiction for the claims of science, shis the

emphasis from science fiction t o science

fiction: one wonders how SF as such can

survive this shi. In Lyotards model oflanguage games invoked in The Postmodern

Condition, the scientific statement is a

denotative, an assertion of a truth claim on a

real referent. Its conditions of acceptance are

that it must be open to repetition by others,

and that the language of the statement is

judged relevant and good by the consensual

community of experts. Science is, on first

glance, a pure game in that the conditions ofproof can only be established through

denotatives. If the legitimation of SF

emphasizes science such denotative proofs are

invoked. As fiction, however, this claim is

problematic; invoking the agonistics of



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invoked. As ction, however, this claim is

problematic; invoking the agonistics of

language games, Lyotard says: This does not

necessarily mean that one plays in order to

win. A move can be made for the sheer

pleasure of its invention: what else is involved

in that labour of language harassmentundertaken by popular speech and by

literature? (10). The purity (or at least

minimally determinable conditions) of

scientific legitimation murders the

fundamentally ludic and impure statements

of the fictional. How could proofs ever be

established for the fictional? For Roland

Barthes, having no real referent is something

like the torment of literature: that it iswithout proofs. By which it must be

understood that it cannot prove, not only what

it says, but even that it is worth the trouble

saying it. However, at this point, everything

turns around, for out of its impotence to

prove, which excludes it from the serene

heaven of Logic, the Text draws a flexibility

which is in a sense its essence (495). The

essence of the fictional is its inessence. The

insistence on the rigor of the scientific, then,

negates the very condition of fiction; another

kind of death. It cannot be so, it will be

objected. But, to return to Freuds Beyond the

Pleasure Principle, this objection can already

be found inscribed there: It cannot be so

(312). Beyond the Pleasure Principle is wrien

as a complex shuffling dancetaking one step

forward, withdrawing it, stepping forward

again. Indeed the essay ends with the image

of limpingas if this extension and retraction

of wild speculations had made Freud

footsore.10 Freud partially withdraws the sole

dominance of the death instinct: the whole

path of development to natural death is not

trodden by all the elementary entities (312);

there is also the question of the sexual

instincts. This begins to elaborate the struggle

between Eros and Thanatos, the life and deathinstincts. And once again this leads us to a

merry dance:

It is as though the life of

the organism moved with



20/27

It is as though the life of

the organism moved with

a vacillating rhythm. One

group of instincts rushes

forward so as to reach the

final aim of life as swily

as possible; but when a

particular stage in the

advance has been

reached, the other group

jerks back to a certain

point to make a fresh start

and so prolong the

journey. (313)

It may have been a misreading, then, to have

seen the history of SF as the detour between

two deaths: who is to say that this continual

renewal, these new movements, cycles of

regeneration within SF are not a clawing back

from the abyss of death rather than a passage

towards it? And yet how would it be possible

to tell the difference? The death instinct has

not been recognized, Freud posits, because it

masquerades as an apparent propulsion

forward, the assertion of life.

The vacillating rhythm between instincts,

between death and life, recalls the structure of

the fort/da game that Freud analyzes in an

earlier chapter of Beyond. The child throws

the bobbin out of the cot, shouting fort, then

reels it back in, shouting da. Freuds

interpretation is that this stages the absenting

and return of the mother: it opens the

suggestion of a beyond to the pleasure

principle because there is more investment in

the unpleasurable absenting of the mother

than in her pleasurable return. One can see a

structurally similar game played by David

Pringle with the name of Ballard. Pringle

wants to assert that Ballard is a writerwithout

that embarrassing pre-modifying SF aached

to the title. Lists of plaudits, from Graham

Greene, Kingsley Amis, Anthony Burgess,

and Susan Sontag, are emphasized becausewhat almost all of these accolades have in

common is that they do not refer to Ballard

primarily as a SF writer. Ballard has

performed the fantasy desire of ecstatic death:

he transcends enre stereot in Biblio .



21/27

.

performed the fantasy desire of ecstatic death:

he transcends genre stereotyping (Bibliog.

xii). Elsewhere, however, Pringle notes that

Ballards earliest (unpublished) aempts as

fiction in the mainstream failed because

Ballard needed science fiction: the pressure of

his imagination demanded a freer outlet

(Alien Planet 7). Pringles criticism reveals an

anxiety which presents itself as a kind of

fort/da game, whereby SF reveals its legitimate

offspring, who, in the processes of

legitimation is orphaned from its parents, and

so is reeled back to the hands of SF once more.

Freuds question, the impetus for his extreme

line of thought (310), is why there is thisconstant repetition of unpleasurein the

childs game, in traumatic neurosis constantly

returning to the traumatic event, in the

repetitious acting out in transference. And

equally it might be wondered why the SF

community, so oen belligerent in its defense

of the genre, nevertheless constantly

entertains fantasies of death. For it remains a

fantasy. The fatality for this death is that topush towards it is forever to defer it, to

perpetuate the detour. In Freud, the detour

that is life is in fact propelled by death; in a

curious way death ceases to be an end, the

termination of the system, and becomes

inscribed within the economy. And if life is a

transitional state between two deaths, this

ultimately subverts the very notion of

beginning and end, suggesting that the idea of

the beginning presupposes the end, that the

end is a time before the beginning.... Analysis,

Freud would eventually discover, is inherently

interminable, since the dynamics of resistance

and the transference can always generate new

beginnings in relation to any possible end

(Brooks, 279). The death of SF is that which is

endlessly desired and yet endlessly deferred.

What, then, can be said about this death? Onecan either view it positively as, paradoxically,

the very motor of SF. But one can also suggest

that such fantasies are produced out of the

structure of legitimation, SFs perpetual

deference to the criteria of worth elaborated



22/27

structure of legitimation, SFs perpetual

deference to the criteria of worth elaborated

for mainstream literature. The death of the

genre is the only way in which SF could

survive as literature. We have grown used to

the language of crisis in relation to SFbut

the term, as in so many other disciplines, hashad its urgency, its punctual (and punctural)

immediacy eroded. SF moves from crisis to

crisis, but it is not clear that such crises come

from outside to threaten a once stable and

coherent entity. SF is produced from crisis,

from its intense self-reflexive anxiety over its

status as literature, evidenced partially here by

Ballards re-marking of the law of genre. If the

death-wish is to be avoided, we need to installa crisis in crisis, question the way in which

strategies of legitimation induce it. The panic

narrative of degeneration might then cease its

tediously repetitive appearance, and its

inversion, the longing for ecstatic death, might

be channeled into more productive writings.

If this is polemic, it rests on a conceit: the

analogy of SF criticisms thrust and Freuds

hypothesis of the death instinct. This is not,

however, as bizarre a linkage as it may at first

appear. Just as SF was the guilty secret, an

unanalyzed and repressed element of the

fictive, so the institution of psychoanalysis

sought to repress Freuds embarrassing

speculations. Like the death drive itself, the

disruptions caused by Beyond the Pleasure

Principle had to be reduced to zero, to be

excluded, expulsed. Now, for Pefanis at least,the death instinct forms a major underlying

thematic (108) to much contemporary theory.

And perhaps this has an equivalence to the

growing visibility of popular literary forms in

the academy. There is one more link, then:

Freud wrote to Eitingon, For the Beyond I

have been punished enough; it is very

popular, brings me masses of leers and

encomiums. I must have made something verystupid there (Gay, 403). To be popular is

somehow to be denied entry to the

legitimatefor SF, for Freud. If the economy

of such legitimations, the deathly equation of

the popular and the stupid, is exposed,



23/27

of such legitimations, the deathly equation of

the popular and the stupid, is exposed,

perhaps analysis can move into more

constructive areas.

NOTES

Thanks to Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr. for his advice and

support. I would also like to thank the anonymous

readers of an earlier dra of this piece for their

invigorating hostility; I have tried to meet some of their

concernsto meet them all, however, would have

negated the very purpose of a polemic.

1. The long closing section of Jaspers Metaphysics is

called The Reading of Ciphers. It presents a

fascinating prospect to read The Drought, a text

obsessively remarking on the unreadable ciphers that

lier the desert, against Jaspers. The cipher-script isthe tremulous evidence of the Transcendent, but it

remains only a signifier; to aempt to grasp the

meaning of the cipher, to convert it into any form of

knowledge, is immediately to see its destruction. In a

sense, to decipher Ballards texts in a single

explanatory model is to effect a violent de-cipherment.

On this, see Roger Luckhurst, Between two walls:

Postmodernist Theory and the Problem of J.G.

Ballard, Ph.D. diss., University of Hull, England, 1993.

2. Ballard has a long citation from this work in themarginal comments to the Re/Search edition of The

Atrocity Exhibition, ed. Andrea Juno and Vale

(Re/Search Publications, 1990), 76.

3. Wolfe, of course, theorizes 20th-century man as The

Masochistic Man, bent on a course of self-destruction.

4. This is of course an overly rigid structure, which is

not meant to impose a fixed topography. Passages

between are always possible; the border could be

determined by the elements which transgress it.However, transgression is meaningful only once an

interdiction has been elaborated. The border

presupposes transgression just as transgression

presupposes the border.

5. Citations from Gernsback from Andrew Ross,

Geing Out of the Gernsback Continuum, Critical

Inquiry 17:419, Winter 1991, and The Encyclopedia of

Science Fiction, ed. Peter Nicholls (London, 1979), 159.

6. This is Andreas Huyssens thesis in Mass Culture asWoman: Modernisms Other, in his Aer the Great

Divide (London, 1986), 44-62. Huyssen is perhaps too

formalistic in suggesting that the low was constituted

by the high; in Britain, at least, the equation of mass

literacy with degenerating literature was part of the

anti-democratic discourses of the time, prompted by



24/27

literacy with degenerating literature was part of the

anti-democratic discourses of the time, prompted by

the 1870 Education Actsome time before a

determinable modernism could be said to have come

into existence.

7. This was in fact the project of the immediate

precursor to the TLS, the Literature journal, set up in1897. Quoted from Keating, p. 76.

8. The specific moment of equating the low with the

degenerate at this time is effectively established when

Keating notes that both Thackeray in the 1830s and

Payn in the 1850s looked upon the Unknown Public

that read cheap fiction as laudable and sowing the

seeds of a potential democracy of literary taste (401-03).

9. On the laer, see the opening comments in

Introduction to Newer SF History, SuvinsMetamorphoses of Science Fiction (New Haven, 1979),

205-07.

10. See Jacques Derrida, Speculationson Freud, in

his The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond,

trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, 1987), 257-409.

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Ballard, J.G. The Voices of Time. London, 1974.

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and Imperialism 1830-1914. Ithaca, NY, 1988.

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Brooks, Peter. Freuds Masterplot. Yale French Studies

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14:618-28, 1981.

Abstract.One notable element of SF criticism is the

constant repetition of pronouncements suggesting the

impending death of the genre. From academic criticism to

magazine columns, the threat of the death of SF is a

persistent motif. The polemical proposal of this article is

that these panic narratives are not aempting to arrest

this death, but in fact desire nothing else. SF is ecstatic

at the prospect of its own death. This is argued by

aending to the way in which SF legitimates itselfaccording to criteria derived from high art. In

accepting these criteria SF accepts the equation of the

generic with the low, and thus must proceed to kill

itself in order to be considered legitimate literature. In

the three modes of legitimation that are considered, a

particular emphasis is given to narratives of the history



27/27

.

the three modes of legitimation that are considered, a

particular emphasis is given to narratives of the history

of SF which posit some kind of prior mythic moment of

SF as undifferentiated from the mainstream of

Literature. In that the prospect of death promises a

return to that state, the desire of SF is to restore an

earlier state of things. This in fact proves to be the

exact definition Freud accords to the death drive. The

article proposes, then, to follow the curious logic of the

detours that constitute the death drive of SF. (RL)


roger luckhurst- the many deaths of science fiction- a polemic

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