elsewhen of the SF Café, we’ve had the shenanigans going on for decades, but we haven’t yet adjusted to the idea of SF as a mode, still search for ways to parse it all as one big generic form, one big conventional template, bound in negotiated strictures albeit abstract.
We can offer any text as SF.
—These works are SF, we shrug, because those who partake in the decision-making—the readers, writers and publishers—are all on some deeper level in agreement that we know it when we see it and this is it .
Well, pretty much in agreement.
Most of the time.
Sometimes, I guess.
Okay, hardly ever.
But hey, it’s only where the consensus breaks down that we have to judge who has the final say.
And then it’s just a matter of who wins the day.
So, say some New Wave writer comes along and does some weird-ass shit riffing off sociology instead of physics, calls it SF. The argument kicks off, with a whole host of nay-sayers arguing that it’s not SF. Others dig this New Wave stuff, accept the offer of this narrative as SF, defend it. When the dust finally settles, you have a new consensus, a genre (re)defined in terms of (re)negotiated conventions.
We can offer any text as SF.
Not Proper Science Fiction
Problem is, there’s little coherence, never mind consensus, only a bunch of camps—scientific fancy, scientistic fabrication, soul fiction, scientific fabulation, symbolic formulation…and so on. Within each of these, there’s generally a coherent idea of what does and does not constitute SF, but these camps are often deeply antipathetic to each other’s views. While renegotiation of conventions may take place within those camps, the talks between them in the SF Café break down into stalemates as positions ossify and negotiable conventions are proclaimed non-negotiable criteria, as if one were to demand metre and rhyme for a poem to be a poem. A reader of scientistic fabrication, for example, might reject the work of a writer of scientific fancy as not proper science fiction .
—That’s fantasy, they might well say.
Each camp allied to a generic form, holding to conventional templates for their SF, angled keen for features as objective and as necessary as the structural criteria of the sonnet versus the mercurial characteristics of poetry, we end up not with a genre (re)defined by the (re)negotiation of conventions but with a turf war over non-negotiable criteria, vague notions of SF that abstract from common strictures the rhyme and metre our free verse eschews.
That every definition offered by a camp is too narrow, too restrictive, an i naccurate schema for the field in toto—this should be self-evident. But I hazard the very notion of negotiated conventions occludes from us a truth indexed in the So Fuck indefinition, that there are no strictures, that under, and within, and through, and beyond the conventions, we can offer any text as SF and make it so, because SF is a mode as the poetic, exploitation of a raw dynamics. We can offer any text as SF, and it is only a matter of time before we remember this.
In the meantime though, the Gordian Knot of SF’s ongoing argument over what constitutes SF is simply cut by the publishers, side-stepping this arg ument entirely to make what they can of SF as a rackspace label. And we’re back to Square One, as someone in the SF Café shrugs and says SF is just the fantasy that can be sold as SF.
A Really Big House
“The Carrick,” “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” and “The Metamorphosis”: all three are commonly called fantasies. From my point of view, any ou tstanding work of art is a fantasy insofar as it reflects the unique world of a unique individual. But when people call these three stories fantasies, they merely imply that the stories depart in their subject matter from what is commonly called reality.
Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures
Definitions of fantasy, just like those of science fiction, come in three flavours—empty, open and
We can offer any text as SF.
—These works are SF, we shrug, because those who partake in the decision-making—the readers, writers and publishers—are all on some deeper level in agreement that we know it when we see it and this is it .
Well, pretty much in agreement.
Most of the time.
Sometimes, I guess.
Okay, hardly ever.
But hey, it’s only where the consensus breaks down that we have to judge who has the final say.
And then it’s just a matter of who wins the day.
So, say some New Wave writer comes along and does some weird-ass shit riffing off sociology instead of physics, calls it SF. The argument kicks off, with a whole host of nay-sayers arguing that it’s not SF. Others dig this New Wave stuff, accept the offer of this narrative as SF, defend it. When the dust finally settles, you have a new consensus, a genre (re)defined in terms of (re)negotiated conventions.
We can offer any text as SF.
Not Proper Science Fiction
Problem is, there’s little coherence, never mind consensus, only a bunch of camps—scientific fancy, scientistic fabrication, soul fiction, scientific fabulation, symbolic formulation…and so on. Within each of these, there’s generally a coherent idea of what does and does not constitute SF, but these camps are often deeply antipathetic to each other’s views. While renegotiation of conventions may take place within those camps, the talks between them in the SF Café break down into stalemates as positions ossify and negotiable conventions are proclaimed non-negotiable criteria, as if one were to demand metre and rhyme for a poem to be a poem. A reader of scientistic fabrication, for example, might reject the work of a writer of scientific fancy as not proper science fiction .
—That’s fantasy, they might well say.
Each camp allied to a generic form, holding to conventional templates for their SF, angled keen for features as objective and as necessary as the structural criteria of the sonnet versus the mercurial characteristics of poetry, we end up not with a genre (re)defined by the (re)negotiation of conventions but with a turf war over non-negotiable criteria, vague notions of SF that abstract from common strictures the rhyme and metre our free verse eschews.
That every definition offered by a camp is too narrow, too restrictive, an i naccurate schema for the field in toto—this should be self-evident. But I hazard the very notion of negotiated conventions occludes from us a truth indexed in the So Fuck indefinition, that there are no strictures, that under, and within, and through, and beyond the conventions, we can offer any text as SF and make it so, because SF is a mode as the poetic, exploitation of a raw dynamics. We can offer any text as SF, and it is only a matter of time before we remember this.
In the meantime though, the Gordian Knot of SF’s ongoing argument over what constitutes SF is simply cut by the publishers, side-stepping this arg ument entirely to make what they can of SF as a rackspace label. And we’re back to Square One, as someone in the SF Café shrugs and says SF is just the fantasy that can be sold as SF.
A Really Big House
“The Carrick,” “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” and “The Metamorphosis”: all three are commonly called fantasies. From my point of view, any ou tstanding work of art is a fantasy insofar as it reflects the unique world of a unique individual. But when people call these three stories fantasies, they merely imply that the stories depart in their subject matter from what is commonly called reality.
Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures
Definitions of fantasy, just like those of science fiction, come in three flavours—empty, open and
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