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 often can the death sentence be passed down,
and when 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 "ghetto" 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 the feminists are
also partially responsible, Charles Platt 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 new decline, or rather a circling back: SF
dying because of itsre-commercialization. This is also the thrust of Charles Platts
claim that "we 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"
that SF 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 still wander 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 of philosophy, 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 after
its death? And is this the fast-fading ghost or the longed-for re-birth? Is it, like
"philosophy," living on, an "SF" after-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 attempt to answer the puzzling
question of its constant, haunting presence in critical considerations of the genre. It is
my polemical proposal that these 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 work of 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 and worship 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
novels" focus 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)
Peter Brigg and Warren Wagar have subsequently offered the inverted perspective
and "perverse" argument that the literal catastrophe is metaphorically "transvalued"
into 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, as liminal 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 what form of death the Ballardian text proposes. Clearly the narrative
of transcendence is attempting to shift 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 Drowned World 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 unattainable "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 the Woman. It is also useful, I think, to retain
Ballards clear debt to Freuds speculations on the literal fact of human aggressivity
and violence inCivilization 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 bodily clearly 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 attraction 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 ghetto 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 "mainstream" is 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 the
centre 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 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
oflegitimation. The paradigmatic topography of ghetto /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 the generic. 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 imposedby largely invisible and unexamined categories of "worth" (the evaluative
designations of "high," as I demonstrate below, are the products of
an historical moment) is left 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 latter 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 often 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 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 to affirming 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
written 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 ghetto 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 shifted
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 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 the specificity of "hard" SFwhich is also asserted by Scholes
in Structural Fabulation, Charles Platt, 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 committing 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 bottom 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 unattainable 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 attempt 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 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 ghetto, the "40 years" (rather than days)
in the wilderness (see Merril, 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 in prehistory; 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, attempts to embed and entwine SF into the
mainstream. Legitimation comes from appropriating, say, Swift, Thomas More or
Lucian to SF; history saves the illegitimate child by discovering its "true" parentage.
This is a fascinating strategy: it is not the attempt 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 ghettoization (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 attempt 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 significance"Posterity 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. Amazing was also instrumental in constructing a community through
reader participation. Whether seen positively or negatively, SF as a genre can only be
understood with reference to where its conventions and limits were inscribed,
despite the constant attempt 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 SF magazine 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
ghettoization effected by Gernsback. This is inaccurate, however; the latter decades
of the 19th century were the crucial 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 Supplement was set up to distinguish the "better authors" from the "rubbish
heap of incompetence,"
7
it should not be forgotten 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
attacked 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 more
complicated kind of novel," and, in an inversion that prefigures Scholess attempt to
displace the "mainstream," Saintsbury also 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 to depart from being
identified solely with the "scientific romance" and his deference (at least in their
letters) 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 case for 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 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 offundamental impurity. This impurity, however, does not mark
an undif-ferentiated "mainstream," 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
ghettoization.
9
Notions of impurity also contravene 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
attempts to claim Swift 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
Swift historically predate, in the internal temporality of the genre they can only
arrive subsequently into the arms of an SF genre determined after they were written.
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 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 Beyond the
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 not concerned 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 immanent "proper" 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 detoursenforced 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 attempts 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 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 of the "ghetto" 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
attempt 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 movements towards
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 "ghetto" walls, and as degenerescent birth-
as-deaths, perverting the specificity of the genre. 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 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 of the
New Wave was the explosion of the genre itself. Aldiss senses a "rapprochement"
with the mainstream, the return from the "ghetto 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, attempting 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 the mainstream. 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, one prediction 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,
written 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 stories are 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 "cutting 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 scientific rigor was a crucial palliative for
early SF: "What seems to have been essential is theillusion 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 be accurate 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 inAstounding in 1944, was deemed to be so
accurate with respect to the research program of the Manhattan Project that the FBI
raided Astoundings offices. The frequent appearance of the anecdote indicates its
utility for claiming the scientific accuracy and 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 removing one idea after 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 attitudes [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, shifts the emphasis from "science fiction" to "science fiction": one wonders
how SF as such can survive this shift. In Lyotards model of language 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 of proof can only be established through denotatives. If
the legitimation of SF emphasizesscience such denotative proofs are invoked.
As fiction, 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 harassment undertaken 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 is
"without 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 written 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 death
instincts. And once again this leads us to a merry dance:
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 swiftly 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 writer without that
embarrassing pre-modifying "SF" attached to the title. Lists of plaudits, from Graham
Greene, Kingsley Amis, Anthony Burgess, and Susan Sontag, are emphasized
because "what 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 genre stereotyping" (Bibliog. xii). Elsewhere, however,
Pringle notes that Ballards earliest (unpublished) attempts 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
this constant 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 often
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 to push 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? One can 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 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, has had 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 install a 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 letters and encomiums. I must have made something
very stupid 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, 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 draft 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
litter the desert, against Jaspers. The "cipher-script" is the tremulous evidence of the Transcendent, but
it remains only a signifier; to attempt 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 the marginal 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, "Getting 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 as Woman: Modernisms Other," in his After 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 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 in
1897. 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 latter, see the opening comments in "Introduction to Newer SF History,"
Suvins Metamorphoses 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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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
attempting to arrest this death, but in fact desire nothing else. SF is ecstatic at the prospect of its own
death. This is argued by attending to the way in which SF "legitimates" itself according 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 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)

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