Spencer - Red Sun Is High

SF-TH Inc
"The Red Sun Is High, the Blue Low": Towards a Stylistic Description of Science Fiction ("Le
soleil rouge est au znith, le soleil bleu se couche": vers une description stylistique de la SF)
Author(s): Kathleen L. Spencer
Source: Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Mar., 1983), pp. 35-49
Published by: SF-TH Inc
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TOWARDS A STYLISTIC DESCRIPTION OF SF 35
Kathleen L. Spencer
"The Red Sun is High, the Blue Low":
Towards a Stylistic Description of Science Ficfton
To understand the language of a text is to recognize the world to which it
refers.
Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics
The persistent attempts to define SF-dating roughly from the time Hugo
Gernsback coined scientifiction-suggest that a clear and widely accepted
definition has been deemed somehow essential to an understanding and appre-
ciation of the genre. Yet, after some 50 years of definitional effort, no formula-
tion has been able to win broad critical support. Given the intellectual energy
expended on this project, the failure to reach a consensus perhaps indicates that
we have been asking the wrong question. Instead of seeking a dictionary
definition of SF, we might be better off to ask, "How do readers identify a text as
SF?"
Such a change in question shifts the focus of the discussion from the
text-as-artifact to the interaction-between text and reader: we are no longer
asking simply about the characteristics of the text, but about how the reader
understands and interprets the text. Approaching the genre by investigating
reader response makes good sense, at least from a structuralist point of view;
for, as Jonathan Culler explains in Structuralist Poetics, a genre can best be
conceived of as "a conventional function of language, a particular relation to the
world which serves as norm or expectation to guide the reader in his or her
encounter with the text."' Faced with a work identified as tragedy, we know
what to expect: "the bad end unhappily, the good unluckily" (as the Player in
Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead puts it). In traditional
comedy, we expect one or more marriages at the conclusion. Westerns and
detective stories have predictable casts of characters involved in quite limited
kinds of relationships and activities; and we accept these as the conventions, the
proper shapes, of the respective genres. End a "Harlequin" romance with the
heroine neither married nor engaged, compose a gothic with no old mansion or
brooding Heathcliffian hero, and your readers will be outraged: you will have
broken the unwritten contract that genre represents.
Genre conventions not only tell us what generally to expect in a given kind
of work, but create a context which guides our interpretation of specific ele-
ments of that work. Consider, for example, a classic "locked-room mystery."
How could anyone have gotten into the hermetically sealed chamber to commit
the murder, and how could he or she escape afterwards without detection?
Faced with this situation, the reader may not at first guess the answer; but she or
he can confidently predict that, no matter how puzzling or impossible the
circumstances may appear, the solution will ultimately turn out to be a naturalis-
tic one, because murder by supernatural agency would violate the conventions
of the detective novel. (There are, of course, genres-horror
or gothic,
for
instance-in which such a supernatural murder would indeed fall within the
range of acceptable solutions, but the detective story is not one of them.)
Since all these familiar genres-westerns, detective fiction, and "Harle-
36 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 10 (1983)
quin" romance-do have comparatively limited sets of acceptable plots and
characters, they can be much more readily characterized than SF. But readerly
competence must operate similarly in the more complex as in the simpler
genres, a fact which suggests a series of questions we can profitably ask about
SF: (1) What are the norms or expectations by which readers interpret SF texts?
What assumptions do they make about the text which allow them to make sense
out of a sentence like "The red sun is high, the blue low"-which, if found in
what Samuel Delany calls "mundane fiction,"2 would be meaningless? (2) What
techniques do SF writers use to create and fulfill these expectations? How do
they produce those sentences which mark the text as SF?
1. To determine the conventions, let us begin with Darko Suvin's definition of
SF, generally accepted as the most satisfactory effort to date at that Sisyphean
task. SF, in Suvin's formulation, is "a literary genre whose necessary and
sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and
cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alterna-
tive to the author's empirical environment."3 That is, in writing SF, the author
creates an environment (an "imaginative framework") different in some signifi-
cant way-in place, time, or circumstances-from his or her own. This frame-
work, by the ways in which it differs from reality (or, in Suvin's careful phrase,
from the "empirical environment") creates estrangement for the readers, sepa-
rating them from their own familiar world.
Estrangement is not a characteristic unique to SF: according to reader-
response theory, all literary texts use unfamiliar elements to disrupt the reader's
expectations. This is because reading is a dynamic process: the reader does not
merely pass an eye over the text, passively absorbing the words printed there,
but actively engages with the text. Sentences do not just convey information;
they also create expectations about what will follow them, from which the
reader constructs a pattern that allows her or him to interpret the text. But while
expository texts generally fulfill those expectations, literary texts frequently
subvert them. When the pattern which the reader has constructed proves not to
account for the newest piece of information, he or she must disengage from the
text and construct a new pattern, one in which the new information does fit
properly; and this new pattern, too, will subsequently be modified in its turn.
Thus the reading process follows a repeated sequence of pattern forma-
tion/ disruption/re-evaluation/pattem reformation: the reader oscillates between
involvement in, and observation of, the world of the text- between experienc-
ing the events of the text as if they were real and happening to her or him, and
disengaging to evaluate the interpretation constructed, in order to identify and
incorporate a disruptive-estranging-element.
Estrangement, therefore, plays a vital function in a literary text, for it
creates that disruption which forces the reader temporarily out of an involvement
in the text (during which she or he is not able to reflect on what is being read),
and forces him or her to grapple actively with the material in order to evaluate it.
According to Wolfgang Iser, a leading reader-response theorist, it is precisely
the reader's attempt to balance these two aspects of reading- involvement and
evaluation-that provides the aesthetic pleasure of experiencing a text. Not, of
course, the actual achievement of balance, which would be mere stasis, but the
dynamism resulting from the failed attempt to achieve balance.4
But if all literary texts employ estrangement, how can we consider it a
defining characteristic of SF? It is not the mere presence of estrangement, but
the unusual degree of estrangement and the particular kinds of estranging
devices it employs that distinguish SF from other genres. SF's characteristic
stance is accurately reflected in its name- that is, it is both "scientific" (meaning
"concerned with the effects of scientific principles, real or imaginary, on socie-
ty," not "true according to the science we know"), and "fictional." The text
posits a novelty (what Suvin calls the "novum"), which separates the world of the
text from the empirical world. But, unlike the novelties of mundane fiction
(which usually consist mostly of placing fictional, though plausible, characters
in a realistic setting), the novum of SF is "'totalizing' in the sense that it entails a
change of the whole universe of the tale, or at least of crucially important
aspects thereof (and... is therefore a means by which the whole tale can be
analytically grasped)" (MSF, p. 64). That is, the novum of an SF story is so much
the key to understanding the work that any capsule summary is bound to feature
it: "X is about an alternate world in which the Axis won World War II" (Dick's
The Man in the High Castle); "Y is about a computer that comes alive and runs
the revolution of a moon colony" (Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress); "Z
is about a man who tries to get away with murder in a future world where
telepaths are so numerous and organized that premeditated crime has become
impossible" (Bester's The Demolished Man).
Having posited this totalizing novum, the SF text proceeds to develop it
with logical rigor, following out the implications-social, technological, cultural-
of that change on the world we know. The result, as Suvin says, is "a narrative
reality sufficiently autonomous and intransitive to be explored at length as to its
own properties and the human relations it implies" (MSF, p. 71). Hence the
importance of cognition in Suvin's definition: the operations of logic limit both
the nature of the fictional world anld the way that world is explained or justified
to the reader.
In the first place, the world of the text niust stand in some kind of
cognitively discoverable relation to our own empirical situation. The writer
should not present us with some mysterious self-contained world which simply
exists somewhere without explanation. Unlike fantasy, the society we are read-
ing about should be identifiable as, for instance, a parallel Earth, or a future
Earth, or an Earth colony on another planet, or a race of humanoids descended
from a colonizing expedition, or a race of aliens.5 As Delany explains, not only
does SF "throw us worlds away, it specifies how we got there" (JHJ, p. 33).
Identifying "where we are and how we got there" establishes a base from
which the reader can reason about the ways in which the world of the text differs
from our world, while simultaneously justifying the ways in which the two worlds
are similar. It reassures us about the continued (though perhaps slightly modi-
fied) operation of familiar scientific and logical laws (gravity, thermodynamics,
induction, cause-and-effect) and equally familiar patterns of human behavior
(family-formation, symbol-making, ritual activity, establishment of hierarchies
or systems for making group decisions and awarding prestige). The continued
relevance of such basic patterns allows us to make reasonable deductions about
the world of the text, despite its unfamiliar features.
Cognition also determines the kind of explanations the author offers for
the details of his or her imagined world, particularly for the technological
changes. These do not need to be based on current scientific knowledge (the
spaceships with "faster-than-light drives" found in numerous SF stories are a
classic example), but the author must invent a scientific kind of explanation for
them, an explanation based on reasoning from "natural laws," whether those
laws happen to be empirically true or not. Where in fantasy one gets magic
instead of technology-flying carpets, for instance-in SF, the reader is presented
with portable "anti-gravity device" and possibly a brief history of its invention.
For some points of view, this may appear to be a distinction without a
difference. On the one hand, we have Arthur C. Clarke's famous dictum that any
sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable froih magic; and on the
other, we have a world like Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea, in which the magic is so
rule-governed that it may seem to have the inevitability of technology.6 And yet,
of course, it does not. Magic, even in Earthsea, still depends on the power,
knowledge, and abilities of the person using it: not everyone is capable of
making a spell work. But, while it requires special skill and knowledge to invent
a technologically-powered tool, it requires no great skill to operate it. One does
not have to be an engineer or a physicist to flip a light switch, or start an
automobile, or trigger a laser gun. The powers of technology are not just
rule-governed but bound by law, impersonal, universal, and predictable, while
the powers of magic remain personal and variable. No matter how much like
science it may appear, magic always retains an irreducible element of art.
Thus the scientific explanatory mode of SF (one of the things Suvin sums
up in the term cognition) is an identifying characteristic of the genre, dis-
tinguishing it categorically from fantasy. Indeed, it distinguishes it from natural-
istic fiction as well. As Robert Philmus has observed, naturalistic fiction does
not require scientific explanation, fantasy does not allow it, and SF both allows
and requires it.7
When readers pick up an SF text, then, two of their most fundamental
expectations are: (1) that the story will happen somewhere else-that time, or
place, or circumstances will be significantly different from their "empirical
environment"; and (2) that the environment of the fiction will be interpretable
by cognitive processes-that is, that it derives from or is related to our own
environment in some logical way, and that it is as bound by natural laws as our
own world, though those laws may differ from the ones we know. These two
expectations together create SF's paradoxical relationship with reality-its
"realistic irreality" as Suvin calls it (MSF, p. viii)-which in turn produces most,
if not all, of SF's defining characteristics. This oxymoron, realistic irreality,
provides the key to the rules by which SF's identifying sentences are generated.
2. From the end of the 18th century until fairly recently, realism was considered
the essential objective of the dominant mode of fiction, one of its defining
characteristics. It is therefore appropriate to inquire how novelists convey the
sense of reality in their work. As Culler observes, the basic convention governing
it is
our expectation that the novel will produce a world. Words must be composed
in such a way that through the activity of reading there will emerge a model of
the social world, models of the individual personality, of the relations between
the individual and society, and, perhaps most important, of the kind of signifi-
cance which these aspects of the world can bear. (SP, p. 189)
Given this convention, Culler says, we should be able to identify elements within
the text which allow us to construct the world, to naturalize the details of the text
by relating them to some kind of natural order or pattern already existing in our
physical or cultural environment. On the simplest level, this function is filled by
what Culler calls a descriptive residue, "items whose only apparent role in the
text is that of denoting a concrete reality (trivial gestures, insignificant objects,
superfluous dialogue).... Elements of this kind confirm the mimetic contract
and assure the reader that he or she can interpret the text as about a real world"
(SP, p. 193). It is, in fact, the very absence of meaning in these elements that
serves most firmly to anchor the story in reality, thanks to the common Western
assumption "that the world is simply there and can thus best be denoted by
objects whose sole function is to be there."8
Beyond this most elementary stage, in which we assume a text refers to a
real world because it is full of items that exist in the real world, is what Culler
calls levels of vraisemblance, or verisimilitude.9 He identifies-at progressively
higher degrees of abstraction-five such levels of "texts," each of which repre-
sents a coherent system of knowledge by which we interpret our experiences,
both of the world and of the story itself.
Among these, three are of particular relevance to effectively identifying
an SF text. The first and most basic level is "the real." This is the world in which
people have bodies and minds, eat, sleep, and die, love and hate; in which
actions begun can be assumed to end (even if we are not explicitly told how); in
which the sun rises and sets daily and the seasons follow their normal course.
This level, Culler notes, "needs no justification because it seems to derive from
the structure of the world" (SP, p. 140).
The second level is cultural verisimilitude. Features on this level do not
have quite the power of "natural law" as those on the first level, for even the
members of the culture in question generally recognize them as culturally
determined and therefore subject to change. Still, as attitudes held by large
numbers of people over long periods of time, they do carry considerable
authority. For instance, to describe someone as being "as inscrutable as an
Oriental" or "as volatile as an Italian" would be to appeal to cultural verisimili-
tude. Reversing the attributes-as volatile as an Oriental, as inscrutable as an
Italian-creates statements which will be rejected as unverisimilar. Cultural
verisimilitude also guides our deductions about persons or incidents we encoun-
ter both in life and in literary texts. Thus when we see a young woman wearing a
diamond ring on the third finger of her left hand, we assume she is engaged to be
married.
It is primarily this cultural level of verisimilitude that provides the infor-
mation by which readers interpret the behavior of the characters in stories; and
often the text itself will contribute explicit interpretations of its own. If, how-
ever, these textually-offered interpretations seem to suggest social and cultural
models markedly "unnatural," we must then shift to the third level of verisimili-
tude, which is a set of explicitly literary and/or generic norms. The operative
notion of "genre" in this context involves not only the familiar literary types-
tragedy, comedy, pastoral, mystery, romance, SF-but also the identifiable
fictional milieux constructed by, say, Faulkner or Henry James, Jane Austen or
Mark Twain. In the works of such authors, we recognize a range of character,
behavior, and event as consistent with their fictional worldview, and hence as
verisimilar; anything outside that range will be rejected as a violation of deco-
rum, as unrealistic. A character like Heathcliff, for instance, though natural and
believable in the gothic intensity of Wuthering Heights, would be totally out of
place in Jane Austen. In recognition of this truth, Tzvetan Todorov remarks that
"there are as many versions of vraisemblance as there are genres."'0
Let us return, then, to the two basic expectations of SF which we have
established: that the story has been distanced or displaced from us in time,
space, or circumstance; and that, because the new setting is both related in some
discoverable way to our own empirical environment and logically consistent in
itself, it is possible for us to interpret it. To the extent that an SF text satisfies our
first expectation, it is "irrealistic": by definition, the novum of an SF text has no
correlative in what we recognize as the real world. However, to the extent that
the text satisfies our second expectation, that the world of the text is governed by
consistent natural laws, it is "realistic": except for those circumstances directly
affected by the posited change, the laws and logic of our familiar world/culture
apply. The result is that a typical SF text follows the normal conventions of
verisimilitude, uses the devices employed in mundane fiction to convince the
reader that the text refers to a real world-but the culture referred to is
imaginary. This fact creates the possibility of exciting new kinds of reading
experience, but also creates great challenges for both writer and reader.
3. Most of the technical difficulties both of writing and reading SF derive from
the fact that the culture upon which the fiction's verisimilitude rests is itself a
fiction, a construct, and hence unfamiliar to readers. From the writer, this
situation demands much greater attention to description and to exposition in
order to make the story intelligible. But description and exposition are, even in
mundane fiction, notorious cloggers of plot and delayers of action; so how is the
SF author to include even more of them without crushing the story helplessly
under their weight? On the other hand, if she or he includes too little, the
imaginary culture will prove opaque to readers and the story will be uninter-
pretable, unnaturalizable. The simplest way to communicate the nature of the
constructed culture would be, of course, to explain it directly to the audience.
However, that approach is more suitable for a speculative essay than a story; and
even the "next best thing," adopted by so many utopists-the device of the
stranger from our world who is introduced suddenly into the midst of this new
culture and to whom someone kindly explains everything-is largely unsatisfying
as fiction. It is as unsubtle as the typical opening-act gossip about the characters
we are about to meet in a play: clear, but undramatic.
The alternative is some kind of oblique approach, in which the author
discusses unfamiliar things in the offhand and allusive manner proper to some-
one referring to items familiar to initiates in the culture-customs, codes of
behavior, traditions, taboos, technologies. That technique allows great econ-
omy at the sentence level: often a single word can suggest volumes about the
unfamiliar society. Onre of the most famous and oft-cited examples is a sentence
of Heinlein's: "The door irised." The term forces the reader to visualize an
entirely new kind of door, circular rather than rectangular, constructed not in a
single piece but perhaps of overlapping panels like the shutters of some cameras.
A door of such design implies something about the technological level of the
society, since it is more complex in its engineering than the hinged door normal
to our experience. It also implies something about the physiology of the crea-
tures for whom such doors were originally designed: its roundness suggests that
they, too, will be more nearly round than human beings.'I Above all, it separates
this imagined society, in a subtle but powerful way, from the one we know. What
kinds of circumstances, we have to ask ourselves, could cause human beings, for
whom a rectangular door is the most functional shape, to adopt "irising" doors as
the norm, or at least as a commonplace?
In describing unfamiliar cultures "from the inside" like this, SF writers are
manipulating what Culler calls the "threshold of functional relevance,...
sequences below which are taken-for-granted" (SP, p. 143). The threshold of
functional relevance describes the level of generality at which we normally
encounter the world: in which we "eat dinner," rather than "pick up our fork in
our right hand, insert the tines into a piece of meat, lift the fork to our mouths,
pull the meat from our fork with our teeth, chew vigorously, and swallow." This
latter description occurs below the level of functional relevance, with the result
that the whole passage, the action, is de-familiarized."2 We re-familiarize it by
identifying the generalization which sums up this activity: eating.
When SF authors write from inside an alien culture (or our own culture
after significant changes), they typically set the level of functional relevance not
lower (as in the example above), but higher than the readers' actual knowledge,
at a level that would be appropriate to someone living inside it-the level at
which we might, in mundane novels, refer without elaboration to "McDonalds"
or "Hollywood" or "slumber parties" or "lobbyists." (They can also, of course,
when writing from the viewpoint of an alien in our culture, write of familiar
things at a level of functional relevance below our ordinary level, to convey the
strangeness of the alien's perceptions, and to force us to see these things from a
new perspective. Ursula Le Guin uses this technique effectively in her short
story "Mazes," which describes the impact of ordinary laboratory tests for
learning ability from the point of view of the subject.)
The technique
grows.
out of a radical separation between the actual
author, who lives in our 20th-century world, and what Wayne Booth would call
the "implied author," who inhabits the world of the novum. It requires a
similarly radical separation between the actual audience, contemporary with
the actual author, and the "implied" or "fictive" audience, which usually shares a
world and a culture with the implied author.'3
This circumstance produces the characteristic obliquity of most SF texts:
the fact that the implied author and implied audience are conceived of as
inhabiting the same culture. Hence things that puzzle us, the actual audience,
cannot be explained directly without destroying verisimilitude. As Marc Angenot
points out,
In a fiction set on an alien planet, what represents for the 'terran reader' the
utmost strangeness must be perfectly trivial and banal for the Alien narrator. It
would therefore be totally abnormal for the narrator to stress this obvious
feature at the outset. It seems more 'realistic' that such data be given en
passant, late in the narrative, and in a rather indirect way.'4
However, the result of this obliquity of technique is that the reader must
approach an SF text almost as if it were in code. He or she must read like a
detective, collecting data which may or may not turn out to be significant. What
the reader is doing, in fact, is constructing the salient features of the culture from
the clues which the author (the actual author) has left him.
Consider, for instance, the following passage from the opening of Pohl and
Kornbluth's The Space Merchants:
I rubbed depilatory soap over my face and rinsed it with the trickle from the
fresh-water tap. Wasteful, of course, but I pay taxes and salt water always
leaves my face itchy. Before the last of the greasy stubble was quite washed
away the trickle stopped and didn't start again. I swore a little and finished
rinsing with salt. It had been happening lately; some people blamed Consie
saboteurs. Loyalty raids were being held throughout the New York Water
Supply Corporation; so far they hadn't done any good.
The morning newscast above the shaving mirror caught me for a moment
... the President's speech of last night, a brief glimpse of the Venus rocket
squat on the Arizona sand.(1:1)
From this, the second paragraph and the beginning of the third in the book, the
reader learns that the story takes place in New York and in the future. The place
we are told explicitly, the time we infer from hints of technological changes.
First, and least important, a new and more convenient technique for
shaving has been invented. We can assume it is widely and readily available, a
commonplace of this world, because the speaker refers to "depilatory soap" in
so offhand a manner: clearly it is not the most important thing on his mind, as it
might be if it were unusual.
Another change, both technological and social, is the presence of a
mass-media viewing screen in the bathroom-"the morning newscast above the
mirror." Again, the casualness of the reference implies that such viewing screens
are common and probably inexpensive and that they are now routinely found
throughout the living quarters of the affluent, at least: after all, it is unlikely that
the speaker, if he had only one such screen, would place it in the bathroom. The
third indication of the technological level of this culture is the Venus rocket:
apparently space travel of some kind has become a reality.
On the other hand, despite these changes, the culture has not been
transformed entirely: the US still has a president for example, and a state named
Arizona. The implication of all this is of a time in the not-far-distant future-
none of the technological changes are much beyond our current capacities, and
the political structure seems to be roughly the same.
However, if politics has not changed much, other social conditions cer-
tainly have. Potable water is severely rationed, with salt water the norm for most
non-consumption uses. The phrase "New York Water Supply Corporation"
indicates something even more significant: that distribution of this essential
commodity is now in the hands of private enterprise. The situation is neither
new nor the result of some recent emergency but is chronic and has been well-
assimilated into the political system, as we can tell from the speaker's connec-
tion of his right to use water with his status as a taxpayer, and by his generally
resigned air about the inconvenience. Resignation, however, is not the only re-
sponse to the shortages: sabotage is an occurrence (or threat, at least) Wide-
spread enough to prompt an organized and official response-the "loyalty
raids" by the New York Water Supply Corporation. Furthermore, this culture
possesses a semi-official (at least organized and recognized) opposition-the
"Consies," who may or may not be supplying saboteurs. This opposition pre-
sumably has little actual power, however, or it would not stoop (or be suspected
of stooping) to extrailegal and anti-social activities like sabotaging the water
supply.
Thus, this one brief passage very early on in the fiction yields considerable
information about the world of the story, but most of it is implied rather than
communicated directly or explicitly. And it has been done very efficiently: note
how much longer this analysis is than the passage itself.
Of course, some of the assumptions we have made from this opening
passage turn out to be not quite accurate: Mitch Courtenay, the narrator, far
from being an ordinary middle-class taxpayer, is one of this world's wealthier
citizens; space-travel is indeed a reality in this world, but a very new one, still the
subject of considerable struggle; and the political system is not quite as familiar
as it sounds. The Presidency, we later learn, is now a hereditary and largely
ceremonial office, while the members of Congress represent not states or
districts, but corporations.
Still, these very readjustments-part of the normal process of pattern
revision that is inherent in reading literary texts-serve to reinforce our impres-
sion of verisimilitude. The narrator is speaking from inside his world, to an
implied audience of his fellows, for whom the hereditary nature of the Presi-
dency is common knowledge. It would be most unusual for him to make any
pointed explanation of such a fact. The effect of reading such a text is that we
have, temporarily at least, joined the narrator in his world. As Suvin says, the
text has created "a narrative reality sufficiently autonomous and intransitive to
be explored at length." Indeed, exploring that reality in all its detail and texture
is one of the prime aesthetic satisfactions of reading SF.
4. But how is this "reality" created? By adapting the normal techniques for
establishing the "reality" of a fictional text to the special circumstances of SF.
The main purpose of what Culler calls descriptive residues-items with no
apparent function in plot or character development, items which are simply
there- is to denote the thereness of the world. SF writers also include such items
in their texts, but now the items do more than denote the simple thereness of the
world they belong to: they also tell us-again, usually in oblique ways-something
about the nature of the world we find them in. As Delany explains, comparing
such catalogues in mundane fiction to their SF counterparts,
The mundane tale proceeds as a series of selections from a theoretically fixed,
societally extant lexicon of objects, actions, and incidents. In the s-f tale, a
series of possible objects, possible actions, possible incidents (whose possibil-
ity is limited, finally, only by what is sayable, rather than what is societal) fixes
a more or less probable range of contents for a new lexicon.'5
That is, in mundane fiction the catalogue of items is limited to objects and events
which actually exist (or could now exist) and which reflect the real world; in SF
the catalogue, limited only by the author's imagination and ability to assemble
and justify new combinations of words, helps to create the world to which it
refers. Thus Delany's sentence "The red sun is high, the blue low" creates a
planetary system with two suns, a red one and a blue one.
Let us consider a more extended example, also from Delany, from the
beginning of his Hugo-winning story, "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-
Precious Stones." The story, we know, occurs in the future, since Mars and the
"Outer Satellites" have been colonized and space flight is common. We also
know that our narrator is a professional thief, just returned from Bellona to New
York. The city is recognizable: the Pan Am Building, Grand Central Station,
42nd Street, and Eighth Avenue all sound like the present New York. But it is
not, quite. Our narrator remarks:
Crossed the plastiplex pavement of the Great White Way-I think it makes
people look weird, all that white light under their chins-and skirted the
crowds coming up in elevators from the sub-way, the sub-sub-way, and the
sub-sub-sub ... bulled my way through a crowd of giggling, goo-chewing school
girls with flashing lights in their hair, all very embarrassed at wearing trans-
parent plastic blouses which had just been made legal again... .The ribbon
of news lights looping the triangular structure of Communication, Inc., ex-
plained in Basic English how Senator Regina Abolafia was preparing to begin
her investigation of Organized Crime in the City.'6
What has happened here? The population of New York has apparently increased
drastically, if two new levels of subways are needed to handle people (not to
mention what changes in building techniques must have been necessary to allow
construction of those levels underneath the current system-unless the current
city is built on top of the old one, or its ruins, and there is no suggestion of that).
The metaphor of the Great White Way has been amusingly literalized: instead
of the light coming from the theater marquis, it now comes from underfoot,
shining through the transparent/translucent plastic of the street itself. (Is this
the only plastic street, a special place? Or is this common? We are never told.)
Women's fashions and sexual taboos are operating in their familiar cyclical
pattern (viz., the way skirt lengths have shifted up and down since the beginning
of the century). The transparent blouses, which the girls are embarrassed at
wearing, have just been made legal again, says our narrator: at least once before
they had been introduced, and then banned. The ribbon of news lights is nothing
new, but the "Basic English" in which they communicate is: the capital letters
indicate that this is an official dialect of sorts, for the benefit of foreign travel-
lers, perhaps, or perhaps an indication of reduced literacy levels and fluency in
English in the city as a whole-or both.
The changes are not particularly dramatic, certainly not difficult to deci-
pher; but note that not one of these details is relevant in any way to the plot of
the story. They do two things: they assure us that the text refers to a "real" world,
one in which some things are simply there, filling in the background of existence
(as some things in our own world are merely there); and they tell us something
about the kind of world this is, what has changed from the New York we know
(the space port, the new subways, Basic English) and what has not (school girls
giggle and chew "goo," senators investigate organized crime).
But both these examples come from works dealing with America in a
not-too-distant future. Constructing catalogues of an alien culture, creating
neologisms and words in alien languages, is rather more complicated, both for
author and for audience. Such catalogues, according to Angenot, are built by a
technique he calls the creation of "absent paradigms." The author invents terms
and then places them in contexts (or syntagmatic relationships) which lead the
reader to "believe in the possibility of reconstituting consistent paradigms-
whose semantic structures are supposedly homologous to those in the fictive
textual 'world"' ("Absent Paradigm," p. 13). That is, the author leads the reader
to suppose that the world can be cognitively grasped and a whole constructed
from these pieces we have been given. If we look at some examples, we ca-n see
more clearly how this works.
Let us take, first of all, the following sentence from Sterling Lanier's
Hiero 's Journey:
Hiero had thought he was familiar with many types of leemutes, the Man-rats
and Hairy Howlers, the werebears (which were not bears at all)' the stimers
and several othe'rs besides.'7
Here we have part of a paradigm assembled for us; and while no single term is
defined, the names Man-rat, Hairy Howler, and werebear taken together suggest
that "leemutes" are a family of large (man, bear), furred (rat, hairy, bear), and
dangerous rodent-like (rat) creatures. But just in case we begin to feel too much
at home with these terms, too confident that we know what the creatures are
like, the parenthetical qualification of "werebear" serves to reassert the
strangeness: they are not really like our bears at all; they are alien.
Note that the one item in the catalogue-stimers-is entirely impenetra-
ble in isolation. It is no accident that this term is the last in the series. Coming
first, it would be entirely opaque, hence frustrating and ineffective at building up
the sense of an intelligible paradigm. Coming last, when we have constructed
some image of what "leemutes" are, it reinforces our belief in the fullness of the
paradigm, while-precisely because the term offers no linguistic handles to us,
no English elements as the others do-it reaffirms the alienness of the sequence.
In short, the primary purpose of such impenetrable terms at the end of cata-
logues like this is, as The Mikado's Pooh Bah observes, "to lend verisimilitude to
an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative."'8
We find another such catalogue in Harlan Ellison's "'Repent, Harlequin!'
Said the Ticktockman": "To his staff, all the ferrets, all the loggers, all the finks,
all the commex, even the mineez, he said, 'Who is this Harlequin?"' Since we
have already learned in the story that the Ticktockman is the Master Timekeep-
er, responsible for punishing people who are late, the first three of these terms
seem relatively interpretable. Fink seems to retain its contemporary meaning,
something like "stool pigeon' or "spy"; "ferrets" presumably "ferret out" infor-
mation; and "loggers" probably "log" or record that information. Given the
further clue of the headword "staff," we can construct a paradigm which allows
us to assign a general meaning to the remaining two (more impenetrable) terms.
Commex perhaps has something to do with communication. As for mineez, the
name suggests minutes, and also miniature-we do learn later that the mineez
are small, and the least important of the staff as well. In any case, notice that
again the most opaque terms come at the end of the list. Here, as in the earlier
example, these mysterious terms help to fulfill the mimetic contract of SF, with
its peculiar demands on both writer and reader.
But the paradigms we construct when reading an SF text do more than
explain the particular term or terms involved: the imagined paradigm, stretching
beyond the terms we have been given, adds a depth to the realization of the
world. It implies other terms in the paradigm which we have not been given, and
other interlocking paradigms as well, by analogy with the way paradigms organ-
ize our own world. By this activity of our imaginations, stimulated and shaped by
the author, the imaginary culture gains a richness and roundedness which makes
the story more convincing and satisfying to the reader.
This technique of implication and indirection in itself creates new possibil-
ities for conveying information about a culture in what Delany calls "syntagma-
tically startling points" (JHJ, p. 80). For instance, in Starship Troopers, while
discussing men's cosmetics (prompted by the appearance of his hero's face in a
mirror), Heinlein reveals in an entirely tangential manner (and after 250 pages)
that the first-person narrator of thebook is non-caucasian. Not only was this fact
in itself a stunning discovery for a black teenager in 1959, but, as Delany
explains, "the placement of the information about the narrator's face is proof
that in such a world much of the race problem, at least, has been dissolved" (JHJ,
p. 80). A fact which is profoundly significant in American culture-race-has
become, in the future envisioned by this novel, so ordinary as to need only the
most casual, even accidental, mention.
One of the most significant ways in which SF differs from mundane fiction,
as Delany observes, is that the relationship between foreground and background
has shifted. This is a natural result of the fact that the worlds and cultures being
described are imaginary: information which the reader of a mundane novel can
take for granted-the appearance and function of bathrooms, for instance, or
airplanes, or Christmas, or the general geography and history of the Earth-
must be specified in an SF text. Thus, if we posit a mundane and an SF text
devoting equal numbers of sentences to character analysis and such traditional
literary concerns, we would find that the SF text reserved a far higher number of
sentences than its counterpart to matters of "background"-landscape, culture,
climate, history, customs. That is, in SF "the deposition of weight [or
ratiol
between landscape and psychology shifts" (JHJ, p. 79). This factor, too, like the
oblique method, inclines the experienced reader of SF to work slowly: knowing
that information is being conveyed in indirect ways, and therefore less sure of
recognizing immediately what is background and what foreground, the reader
tends to pay close attention to everything-which in itself, of course, further
skews the relationship between foreground and background. To put the same
point another way: practically everything in an SF text, at least on first reading,
is foreground.
5. To return, then, to our original questions, and summarize our conclusions: (1)
What are the assumptions which readers make about SF texts? First, that such
texts will concern a world displaced from the reader's empirical environment in
time or in space; or if neither, then circumstances will be radically different
(e.g., Earth is being invaded by aliens). Second, that the world of the text can be
understood by cognitive means: it is related in some logical (and usually speci-
fied) way to our world, and it is bound by its own natural laws (which may or may
not be identical with ours, but which in most cases will be fairly similar). (2)
What techniques do SF writers use to fulfill these expectations? They employ
the normal techniques of verisimilitude, except that the world reflected is
entirely imaginary. The most significant element in producing this sense of
verisimilitude is the creation not only of a fictive author but of a fictive audience
which shares the culture of the same period. This leads to all the other tech-
niques specific to the genre: the usual allusiveness and obliquity of explanation
(since the actual author must be careful not to offer direct explanations of things
the fictive audience would take for granted), the manipulation of levels of
functional relevance, and the construction of absent paradigms.
This is not a complete list of the strategies of SF, nor have I discussed or
even identified all the implications and corollaries of the techniques examined
here. A number of intriguing linguistic questions still need investigation. For
instance, it would be instructive to catalogue in some detail the terms authors of
SF invent to realize their imaginary worlds-both those terms which involve
morphological invention (like leemutes and mineez) and those where the "sci-
ence fiction" enters at the syntactic level, like "depilatory soap" or "The red sun
is high, the blue low." Such a catalogue would allow us to analyze much more
specifically than I have here the nature of the linguistic manipulations SF writers
use to create their different effects.'9
On another level, we need to establish a convincing set of criteria by which
we can evaluate SF on its own terms. Academically-trained critics tend to
discuss SF in terms of depth of characterization, originality of plot, subtlety of
style, perceptivity of theme, richness of symbol, and the like. But these may not
be the only, or even the most important, criteria by which to judge it. As Delany
remarks, "By and large, science fiction does not have time for symbolism (in the
accepted sense of the word); its aesthetic framework, when richly filled out, is
just too complex" (AS, pp. 60-61); and while this is not true for all SF (it is not
true of Delany's own work, for instance), it is nonetheless a suggestive state-
ment. The genre makes intense demands on the writer in ways that mundane
fiction does not, particularly in the matter of creating an imaginary culture
which is both convincing and comprehensible, and then communicating it to the
reader as the background of a story. To complain in such a case that "character-
ization is flat" is to overlook the possibility that the culture itself should rightly
be considered the leading character of an SF story. Again, most discussions of
"style in SF" mean "traditional literary style." While some SF writers are,
indeed, gifted literary stylists in this traditional sense, such a focus ignores the
specifically SF uses of language, which may be comparatively skillful in a story
undistinguished stylistically in the ordinary way.
On yet another level, we need to construct a convincing model that
explains the relationship of SF to the other non-mimetic genres of fiction,
especially fantasy and the Fantastic (as defined by Andrzei Zgorzelski in "Is
Science Fiction a Genre of Fantastic Literature?" in SFS No. 19). Such a model,
clarifying by contrast the ways in which these genres are structurally alike and
those in which they differ from one another, can help us complete the catalogue
of defining characteristics. The final result of all these investigations should be
an aesthetic of SF, distinct from (if partially overlapping) the aesthetic criteria
for mundane fiction. Such an aesthetic would allow us to explain why a text that
has few of the ordinary artistic elements of mundane fiction can still validly be
considered a good example of SF, and thus allow us to defend these works and
our own judgments of them against our more traditionally-minded colleagues,
who still largely assume that "good" and "science fiction" are mutually exclusive
terms. And that, it seems to
me,
is an end worth struggling for.
NOTES
1. Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Studv
ot
Literature (Ithaca, NY: 1975), p. 136-hereafter, SP.
2. The sentence is to be found in Delany's "About 5750 Words," reprinted in
The Jewel-Hinged Jaw (NY, 1977)-hereafter, JHJ. I have chosen to adopt his
designation mundane, despite its condescending overtones, as a usefully contrastive
form, implying here not "pedestrian" but merely "earthly." The other advantage of
the term is that it avoids the debates often aroused by the other most current terms,
"mainstream," "realistic," or "naturalistic."
3. Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (New Haven, CT: 1979), pp.
7-8-subsequently, MSF.
4. Iser, "The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach," in Reader-
Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism, ed. Jane P. Tompkins
(Baltimore, 1980), p. 61.
5. Recently there have been some works published which by all other stand-
ards established in this paper would seem to be SF, but which do not specify their
relationship to our world-for instance, Elizabeth Lynn's trilogy, The Chronicles of
Tornor. The land and its inhabitants, human and animal, are frankly earthlike,
biologically and psychologically, but Tornor does not exist on any maps of Earth. It
may be significant, however, that the trilogy is marketed as fantasy, though it has
none of the usual hallmarks of that genre-no magic, ino fabulous beasts, no super-
natural elements of any kind, except that the world is imaginary and the society
feudal.
6. I am indebted for this observation to Prof. Richard Erlich of Miami Univer-
sity of Ohio.
7. Philmus, "Science-Fiction: From Its Beginning to 1870," in Anatomy of
Wonder, ed. Neil Barron (NY, 1975), pp. 5-6.
8. Roland Barthes, "L'effet de reel," Communications, 11 (1968):87.
9. My discussion is essentially a summary of Culler's extended discussion of the
first three levels of vraisemblance (SP, pp. 140-48). He also discusses at length (pp.
148-60) the two remaining levels: the "conventionally natural," marked by both an
explicit awareness in the text of literary convention (e.g., detective novels which talk
about the conventions of detective novels), and the implicit or explicit claim to
realism on the grounds of not following such conventions; and the level of parody
and irony, which Culler explains as a "localized and specialized variant" of the
fourth level. On this fifth level, the text in question and the text it parodies are
both naturalized by reference to another level in which the terms of the opposi-
tion can be held together by the theme of literature itself. However, neither of
these additional levels is germane to my topic; and I have therefore omitted
them in the body of my essay.
10. Todorov, "Introduction," Communication, 11 (1968):2-5.
11. I am indebted to Prof. George Guffey of UCLA for pointing out the
physiological implications of the door's shape.
12. The technique can also be used for comic effects, as Samuel Beckett's
work frequently demonstrates.
13. Other patterns, of course, are possible: the fictive author could address an
audience which does not share his or her culture or time-say, his or her own
descendants, who might need explanations of details which would be comprehensi-
ble to a fictive audience of contemporaries. Or both fictive author and audience
could inhabit a time following the events of the story (talking about their own
long-past history). What does not seem justifiable is for the fictive author to address
the actual audience directly, since the actual audience exists in the story's past. This
is a subject which obviously needs more detailed study; but even at this stage, it
seems clear that the narrative stance, the precise relationship established between
the fictive author and fictive audience in any given SF text, is a significant element in
solving the problems of exposition.
14. Angenot, "The Absent Paradigm," Science-Fiction Studies, 17 (1979):16.
15. Delany, The American Shore: Meditations on a Tale of Science Fiction by
Thomas M. Disch- "Angouleme "(Elizabethtown, NY: 1978), p. 55-subsequently,
AS.
16. This quotation is based on the text in The Hugo Winners, Volumes One
and Two (Garden City, NY: 1971), p. 814.
17. Cited by Angenot, op cit., p. 13.
18. I am indebted to Prof. Susan Brienza of UCLA for pointing out stimer's
terminal position (among many other insightful comments).
19. Eric Rabkin, in "Metalinguistics and Science Fiction," Critical Inquiry, 6
(Autumn 1979):79-97, raises a related question; but he is concerned instead with the
different uses SF makes of the metalinguistic aspect of language, while I am concerned
with how the authors create the terms in the first place.
RESUME
Kathleen L. Spencer. "Le'soleil rouge est au ze'nith, le soleil bleu se couche"': vers
une description stylistique de la SF. -I s 'agit d 'tine etude tvpologique de la SF qui
cherche a repondre aux questions relatives au langage
caracteristique
de ce genre:
(1) Par quelles conventions le lecteur interprete-t-il les enonces de SF? (2) Quelles
techniques utilisent les auteurs pour satisfaire ces attentes?
L 'auteur anali'st la definition de D. Suvin qui etablit le genre sur l 'interaction
de la connaissance et de la distanciation. En termes d 'attentes du lecteui; cela veut
dire que l'intrigue est etablie "quelque part ailleurs ' en un lieu
signiJicativement
difterent du monde empirique du lecteur. mais que l'e6cart avec le
monde.fonction-
nel est derive de /acon logique. c'est a dire cognitivement valide, et que ce monde
lictionnel
est. comme le
n6tre.
regi par
des lois
naturelles.
Ces deux attentes
determinent les caract&istiques litteraires du genre.
L'auteur utilise la poetique structuraliste et la theorie de la reception et
decrit la
facon
dont la SF adapte les techniques de la vraisemblance narrative pour
presenter une civilisation imaginaire. La technique la plus cruciale est un procede
oblique par lequel la societe imaginaire est decrite du point de vue de quelqu 'un de
familier 'a cette cultutre imaginaire s adressant a un public fictif qui tiendrait pour
acquis ce que le public r*el percevra comme speciJiquement etranger a ses
paradigmes emphiques. On examine d'autres techniques analogues et on vient a
conclure que le texte de SF depend dune reconstruction active par le lecteur de la
culture
fictionnelle
presente~e a lui par des voies indirectes. (KLS)
Abstract.
- Mv aim in this paper is to answer some questions about the characteristic
language of SFas a genre: (I) What are the norms or expectations- the con ventions-
bv which readers interpret the sentences of SF texts? How do thev make sense of
sentences (like the one in nit title) which, in a "realistic "text, would be nonsensical?;
(2) What
techniques
do SF writers use to create and fufill those
expectations?
I begin with Darko Suvin sdefinition of SFas "a literary genre whose necessarv
and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and
cognition. and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to
the author's
enpirical
environment. " The two crucial terms, cognition and estrange-
ment, intieract to produce the SF readers most fundamental expectations of the
g(enre: v1) that the storyt happens somewhere else-that place. or- time, or circum-
stances are significantlv different from the reader's own real world; and (2) that the
"enmpirical env ironment
"
of the fiction
is derived from the reader's own empirical
environment in some logical, and theretore cognitivelv discoverable. wav; and
fU,rther;
that
this new environment
is bound
bhi
natural
laws
as our
own is.
These
two
expectations together create SFs paradoxical relationship with reality - its "realistic
irreality "as Susvin calls it- which in turn pr'oduces most. if not all, of'SF's detining
literary characteristics.
The next stage of the paper uses structuralist poetics and reader-response
theory to explain how
fictional
texts con vev the impression of reality, and then looks
to .see howt SF adapts these techniques to make convincing the portraval of an
imaginar)' culture. The most crucial and characteristic technique is an obliquitvi of'
appi'oach: rather than describing an alien culture frankly to an "earth " audience
fr-om
the
outside,
the SFauthor
typicallv
writes
from
the
standpoint of'an
inhabitant
of the culture addressing a
fictive
audience of his or her contemporaries, who take
forgranted precisel/ those characteristics of'the culture that the actual audience will
find
most unlike their own real experience. Another technique relies on the power of
afeu' ulntamiliar (invented) terms. properli' grouped and sequenced, to suggest the
existence of a wvhole class of beings or experiences of which these terms are part. The
common
factor
in all these techniques of SF is that they depend upon the reader's
activtel/v constructing an image of the culture being conveyed to her or him by
indirect means, and hence interpreting the
significance of details which the
author narrator supplies but does no*t overtl/ explain. (KLS)

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