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The forces of Strange Fiction
01/03/2008 . Source: Hal Duncan 
It's a tricky thing, all this genre and sub-genre. Luckily, we have Scottish author Hal 'Vellum' Duncan on hand to throw some light on the twisty subject. Our various genres have more in common than they have against each other. Much of that faith is founded on Hal having come up through science fiction as a fan, being transferred to fantasy as a writer, and realising as a critic (of sorts) that many of the techniques he was using were horror! Buy Vellum in the USA - or Buy Vellum in the UK  A Rationalist Romance
During a recent discussion on my blog, Jonathan McCalmont of SF Diplomat asked me a couple of gnarly questions: why do you think that horror, SF and fantasy are kept separate from romance and crime? they all deal in fictional worlds... Is there really anything more than similar marketing demographic that unites SF and fantasy but not SF and romance?
So. All of these genres have their roots in proto-Modernity, I think. What the fuck is proto-Modernity? Well, briefly, as Clute says in his Fantastika and the World Storm essay, the Enlightenment radically reshapes our notions of fiction and literature. Beforehand, with the Renaissance you have the aesthetics of (Neo-)Classicism and Romance, but those aren't in dialectic opposition until the Enlightenment comes along. When it does you get this new scientific outlook called Rationalism, idealising Reason, and the complementary world-view of Romanticism, idealising Passion, the two defined partly in relation to the past (Classical Greece and Dark Ages Europe) but largely in relation to each other.
In the interactions between them you get, I think, an initial synthesis of thesis and antithesis. I call that "proto-Modern" rather than "pre-Modern" because the latter term is usually associated with an equation of the Modern worldview with (scientific) Rationalism, an assumption that the worldview before Modernity was more (superstitiously) Romanticist. Contrary to this, I think we can identify a stream where Rationalism and Romanticism are in conflict with each other through the medium of individual texts -- i.e. where the author isn't purely allied one way or the other but playing out the conflict in their writing, trying to synthesise the two aesthetics.
So, we have the period in which the novel is being born as a Rationalist endeavour and thereby distinguished from the earlier Romance, but where the Romantic aesthetic is being constantly brought back into play in the novel, in attempts to fuse them, to create a Rationalist Romance. In that long period up to 1900 or so we get the roots of every modern genre. We get Samuel Richardson, Ann Radcliffe, Emily Bronte, Jane Austin (roots of Romance). We get George Macdonald, Lewis Carroll, E. Nesbitt, Kenneth Grahame (roots of Fantasy). We get Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, John Buchan, H. Rider Haggard (roots of Adventure). We get Edgar Allan Poe, Rudyard Kipling, M.R. James (roots of Horror). We get Ernest William Hornung, Arthur Conan Doyle (roots of Crime). We get Mary Shelley, Jules Verne, H.G. Wells (roots of Science Fiction).
None of these writers are "genre" in the modern sense because genre in the modern sense doesn't yet exist. There's a distinction between populist Gothic (Romantic) fiction and more high-brow mimetic (Rationalist) fiction gradually merging into the distinction between "pulp" and "literary" modes, and some of these writers are stuck on either side of that boundary, but most of them are in a zone between the two; they're not really Gothic but they're certainly not Victorian Realists. Because of the dynamic nature of that zone, many of those writers are formative of multiple genres because they work in multiple modes, but many of them are also seen as "literary" classics because the class divide and notions of "commercialism" haven't yet fucked over the debate.
The literary "variety" journals in the UK, most notably the Strand, capture the last days of this proto-Modernity perfectly, publishing many of the writers named above alongside poets and short story writers of any and every mode. Ghost stories, detective stories, all sorts of strange fiction sits side-by-side with the non-strange. All of this stuff is begging to be critiqued in terms of subjunctivity level (the extent to which events described in a sentence "could happen" or "could not happen" according to the "laws of reality") and boulomaic modalities (the extent to which those events are presented as things which "should happen" or "should not happen", rendered with an implicit or explicit sense of desire and dread), I think, in the sort of way you can also approach a contemporary work like NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN which doesn't sit in any one genre but is clearly using the techniques that are fundamental to genre.
Likewise, this proto-Modern strange fiction doesn't fit into this genre or that, and we shouldn't try and force it to just to validate our genres with historical ancestries, but it is deeply concerned with the effects that derive from stepping outside the "could have happened" subjunctivity level of purely naturalistic, purely mimetic, social realism. Even in Dickens the importance of melodrama and the aesthetic of the grotesque should not be underestimated.
The Birth of Genre
Anyway, then the steam train of Modernity hits and leads to mass-production and mass-marketing, greater literacy and a corresponding shift in class demographics. Through the last half of the 19th century we see the penny dreadfuls and dime novels burgeoning; then, with the turn of the new century, suddenly we start to see magazines and imprints dedicated to specific "genres". From the early 1900s through to the 30s or 40s, there's a boom that utterly reshapes the territory. It's a totally evolutionary process -- expansion, diffusion, isolation, specialisation -- that leads to most of the pulp genres we have today and a few that are now all but defunct. A process of symbolic formulation sets in within all of those genres, of course. Marketing to readers on the basis that there's a discrete audience for "more of the same" means codifying "the same", defining what each genre is, or should be, in terms of conventional tropes of character, background and plot structure.
The fallout of this, in many respects, has a terrible impact on fiction. Because all of these genres are based on the reactions invoked in the reader when confronted with certain combinations of subjunctivity levels and boulomaic modalities, anything which uses those same combinations, and thereby invokes the same reactions, is suddenly perceived as being a work of this or that "genre". In fact, even fiction which uses variant combinations, in using the same underlying techniques, invokes the same reactions and thereby comes to be perceived as "genre"... and therefore allied with "pulp" rather than "literature". This is the point where our contemporary concept of genre is really born, genre as a quality in and of itself, where a work can be described not as being in a genre or of a genre, but as simply genre.
For a middle-class and middle-brow readership to whom intellectual status is important (and for whom mimetic representation is mistakenly equated with relevance) those associations bring on a crisis of faith -- should they really be reading such "sensationalist" pulp? Should they really be reading this... genre crap? That negative reaction plays out in writing and publishing as writers and editors, as readers, fall victim to the same crisis of faith or simply to the market forces born of it. Soon there's no fucking way you could publish a journal like the Strand and there's no fucking way you could run a publishing imprint which had a similar diversity; before you know it that dialectic is reified in an uncrossable divide between high-brow general literature (which has to be mimetic) and everything else, which has to be fitted into one genre or another.
The Rebels of the Ghetto
But with this new dialectic introduced by Modernity, that of "pulp fiction" and "literature", while we're seeing these new commercial genres developing under constant pressure towards symbolic formulation, we can also see a new breed of aesthetic upstarts and refuseniks committed to finding the synthesis of those opposing theses. These writers (and editors) know fine well how valuable the techniques of strange fiction are, that mimesis is not the be-all and end-all of fiction.
Unfortunately, from the start their choices are limited by that divide: they can either go for broke and create something so radical that its "high-brow" status can't be denied, or they can work within the dictates of commercial genre publishing, try and remake the genre and prove its literary validity. Where they choose the former you get the "elitist" strangeness of Modernism which the middle-brow middle-classes ultimately reject, and a feedback loop of cerebralism that drives the survivors up into the ivory towers of Post-Modernism. Where they choose the latter is where the story really gets interesting.
We can see some historical distinctions here, in terms of how this played out, between the deeply strange genres -- SF, Fantasy and Horror -- and genres like Crime and Romance where it's more the "laws of normality" that are disrupted than the "laws of reality". Romance is widely renowned (or disrenowned?) as the most formulaic of the genres, the most deeply-bound to conventional tropes of character, background and plot-structure. This is, I'd say, because the melodramatic use of boulomaic modalities is the one strange methodology allowed in general literature because it was formative of it.
Most of Victorian "Realism" hinges on the most melodramatic twists and turns of fate. Thomas Hardy, anyone? So the contemporary realism born of that has always had to accommodate the strangeness of the boulomaic modalities and subjunctivity levels underlying Romance (the "should have happened" desires, the "could not have happened" coincidences that make or break relationships) or it might have little to hold the reader's interest at all. So if you're a Romance writer who wants to be "high-brow" you can pretty much jump ship to the "mainstream" without a problem. Leaving Romance to be the deeply formulated genre that it is. (Or, at least, that it appears to be; I'd be happy for my assumptions to be corrected by someone with more knowledge of the genre than myself.)
With SF, Fantasy and Horror, the opposite is true. The full-on breaches of the "laws of reality" here are the most noticeable markers you can get in strange fiction and therefore the most quickly and deeply rejected. The result? Way more would-be writers and editors who wanted to use those techniques and had little choice other than to ally themselves with the genre ghetto. With writers like Edgar Rice Burroughs and H.P. Lovecraft directly carrying on the proto-Modern idiom of their predecessors, the dynamic fuckedupness of this three-in-one genre of "weirdness" that was not yet divided working against the pressure towards symbolic formulation, and the influx of a new generation of writers and editors utterly serious about the potentials of the form, the struggle to hammer this pulp genre into a legitimate mode of literature was over before it began. Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, John W. Campbell, Philip K. Dick, and so on through an A to Z of writers and editors -- the field, even when it's been marked by bad prose, cardboard characters and other such flaws, has never been wholly formulaic.
Of course, the struggle to force a recognition of that legitimacy has been going on ever since, and the pressures towards symbolic formulation have unrelentingly undermined that struggle by reinforcing the wide-spread association of the key combinations of subjunctivity levels and boulomaic modalities we find in SF, Fantasy and Horror with the most derivative and formulaic pulp. This is one hugely important shared feature of the three weirdest genres of strange fiction -- the external struggle for recognition and the internal struggle against formulation. In some ways the division of forces has helped (allowing us to attack the "mainstream" on three fronts -- think Army, Navy and Airforce) but in other ways it has weakened us, too often set us against each other, squabbling and bickering like cretinous children.
Divided We Fall
The infamous article by Greg Benford in which he bemoans the pernicious influence of Fantasy on SF, painting the writers and readers of the former as parasitic infiltrators and usurpers of the latter, is, I think, symptomatic of the worst kind of internal feuding. By entirely missing the fact that symbolic formulation is how every fucking genre works he points us away from the real internal problem of symbolic formulation, the real "infiltration" of hack writers and fans with uncritical loyalty (the Fifth Column that is spread throughout Army, Navy and Airforce, to extend the military metaphor). Worse still, in pointing us toward Fantasy as the culprit here he squanders his own energy and forces others to squander theirs in a pointless brawl over his insult to honour (like a group of infantry grunts and sailors kicking the shit out of each other because one drunken moron from the Army shouted that all sailors were fucking cowards, scared to go where the action really is).
Esprit-de-corps is all very well in the battlefield. But make no mistake, Benford's rhetoric is counter-productive, because it turns that esprit-de-corps into boorish pride and ignorant animosity. As such, to any Fantasy writer or reader who knows that their genre is engaged in the same struggle with the same level of commitment, it reads as a profoundly insulting, thoroughly ignorant and deeply arrogant attempt to hierarchise the genres, to assert a greater legitimacy for one section of the field by scapegoating another as the source of all failures. It's fighting talk. I've said it before and I'll say it again...
Fuck that shit.
Thing is, we have a shared battleground of (dis)respect that binds these genres inextricably. And at a deeper level we have a shared technology of literary techniques (everything I've been outlining in my model of strange fiction) that binds us even more. In fact, there's this huge force that exists across the genres, a sort of "Sixth Column", a Special Forces of Speculative Fiction, drawn from Army, Navy and Airforce, trained in using every aspect of that shared technology, and out there fighting on all fronts beside the soldiers, sailors and pilots of SF, Fantasy and Horror. I'll confess to a bit of esprit-de-corps here in terms of my own loyalty to that section of the field. As much as I recognise the skill you get with specialisation, I'm invested too heavily in the "Special Forces" ideal to be truly objective when those arguments kick off; I may well tend to go into a... well... "take on all comers" stance, bullishly and foolishly ready to try and prove that my crowd can kick anyone's arses cause, yeah, all the Fifth Columnists are weaned out from our ranks by the rigours of training. Part of our whole raison d'être requires purging symbolic formulation.
United We Stand
But I know my own bullshit and I'll cop to it freely. Ultimately I'm way more concerned with slapping down the bitch-fights because I do believe, with a fucking passion, that each of the three genres have more in common than they have against each other. Much of that faith is founded on having come up through SF as a fan, being transferred to Fantasy as a writer, and realising as a critic (of sorts) that many of the techniques I was using were Horror. So because so many of the old "genre distinctions" between the three often seem little more than ciphers for hierarchical/territorial assertions of legitimacy, my core impulse is to focus on ripping those apart.
I'm happy to reformulate afterwards, try and take account of how all this strange fiction can and does take radically different paths, but that hasn't quite led me back to the old trinity of SF, Fantasy and Horror as essentially distinct forms. Instead I see various forms distributed between the marketing categories -- Symbolic Formulation, Scientific Fancy, Soul Fiction, Scientistic Fiction (the one form solely limited to SF, I'd say), Spectacularist Fiction (as central to SF in the form of Space Opera as it is to Fantasy in the form of Heroic/High/Epic Fantasy), Structural Fabulation, and so on.
Crime has, I think, a similarly complicated history to our genre, with writers like Chandler reforging it early on into an innovative rather than derivative mode, but with a constant struggle against external prejudice and internal formulation. Hell, one of the innovations of Crime fiction, the idiom of Noir, was stolen lock, stock and barrel by SF and played a major role in the revamping of SF that took place with cyberpunk in the 80s, so I think we owe that genre one big tip of the hat. Ultimately though, I'd have to say I'm just not well enough read in the genre to feel confident making generalisations about the genre from a commercial/historical perspective. The combinations of subjunctivities and boulomaic modalities used by it, though -- those are widely enough disseminated into the mainstream that their importance is, I think, self-evident in something like NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN which, as any reader of my blog might gather, I rate pretty fucking highly.
The same caveat holds true for Western fiction, which is another interesting case. It seem to have pretty much died out in the written form, and I can't think of the last time I read a pure-bred genre Western story. But it saw a radical overhaul in the cinematic form in the 1970s and every so often you get these major works like THE UNFORGIVEN. (Although I prefer the awesome Gnostic parable that is THE QUICK AND THE DEAD, or the original bleak-and-gritty revisionist Westerns of Sergio Leone (or THE OUTLAW JOSIE WALES) which did the same thing, I think, the later Eastwood flick did but just didn't get the same recognition.) I sort of wonder if the Western had to die as a distinct genre before those contemporary examples of it, coming out of the mainstream of the industry, could be accorded the kudos of Greatness.
With the weirder genres woven round each other into this three-ply braid of strange fiction, maybe -- hopefully -- we have a strength to survive, to be still standing there stubborn and proud as the lines of contemporary realism crumble, as they seem to be doing already. We have the Roths and Attwoods turning to strange fiction from outside the genre tradition, demonstrating even in their disacknowledgements of genre the profound potentials of the techniques from which that genre is built; but we also have the Chabons and Lethems, published without the genre labels but openly defiant of that old, middle-brow neurosis which seeks to distinguish "pulp" and "literature". The rebels of the ghetto have broken loose, it seems. The walls are coming down. Where many old school writers and readers seem to see the death of SF in the end of the ghetto era, I see this as the start of a new era, one that may well be a Golden Age for strange fiction.
The Territories of the Ghetto
So from here and now, looking forward at the future and back at the past of strange fiction, maybe it's worthwhile taking a look at the territories that have developed within that ghetto, where exactly we're at now, if it's not so simple as SF, Fantasy and Horror. A while back, on his LiveJournal, Jay Lake had a stab at developing a taxonomy of the sub-genres to be found in SF and Fantasy. It's a project I'm in two minds about. On the one hand, I think the whole idea of it smacks of a content-oriented approach to the field, an attempt to sub-divide into discrete types identified by their key combinations of tropes. But on the other hand, I think the processes of symbolic formulation at play in the field do actually have the effect of generating these identifiable types, these classes of strange fiction.
So I thought what I'd do is kick his taxonomy about a bit and look for... well... types of types, to take it as a springboard and see where it leads us. None of this is to be taken as an essentialist classification of the examples given, many of which have been, I'm sure, placed in highly arguable positions due to the preliminary and cursory approach I've taken. Rather, these classes should be understood as paths of development that strange fiction can take and has taken, corners into which the genre has branched, sometimes treading a trail blazed by a few pioneers to a barren dusty highway, sometimes turning off one beaten path at the most unobvious junction, switching from one path to another, or wandering off into uncharted wilderness.
So, Jay starts off with Gothic, separating this out into three modes that I'm not honestly convinced by. I also think that if you're going to cast a wide enough net to include Gothic you need to cover the other forms of early strange fiction -- the works I've classified as proto-Modern. Which leads me to a first group of "sub-genres":
Proto-Modern Romance
- Gothic - Frankenstein, Dracula, Melmoth
- Victorian Adventure -- She, King Solomon's Mines, The Lost World
- Scientific Adventure - From the Earth to the Moon, The Time Machine
- Juvenile - Wizard of Oz, Peter Pan, Wind in the Willows
- Fable -- The Gods of Pegana
Here we've got the various developments of and from popular pre-Victorian, Victorian and post-Victorian fiction. We could include Stevenson, Buchan, Conan Doyle, Haggard and a whole lot more here, but that would take up too much room and too much time. So let's just say that what we've got here is narratives largely structured as Romantic Adventures, with the gradual emergence of the Secondary World from the influence of fabulation -- Oz, Neverland, Pegana. It's where these two features come together that the next group emerges...
Fictions of the Pre-Industrial Idyll (to be Saved)
- Secondary World Epic -- Worm Ouroboros, Well at the World's End, LotR
- Juvenile - The Chronicles of Narnia
- Heroic Quest - Dragonbone Chair, Sword of Shannara, The Last Unicorn
- Anthropomorphic -- Watership Down
- Deconstruction - Princess Bride, Discworld, The Iron Dragon's Daughter
Here your backdrop is an ultimately idyllic secondary world reconstructed from our myth, folklore and fable (childhood and the past idealised). And the narrative is Romantic Adventure restructured as such. The result is the Epic / Heroic monomyth focused on a single innocent hero / heroine, sometimes expanded to the noble band, the fellowship on their Quest to save the kingdom. We see this all over the genre, formulated by homage & copying, or deconstructed by parody or critique. When it's reconstructed by historification we get the next group...
Pre-Industrial Baroque World (to be Won)
- Pseudo-Mediaeval Epic- Tigana, A Game of Thrones, Prince of Nothing
- Arthurian -- The Once and Future King
- Greek -- Clash of the Titans, Jason and the Argonauts
- Sumerian -- Gilgamesh
- Celtic - Tam Lin
Backdrop here is still a secondary world but this is reconstructed from history and legend -- or myth, folklore and fable remade as legend. It takes place in more of a post-mythic "Age of Men" world, one that manifests our desires and dreams and so is imbued with wonder but one where the resultant vibe is more baroque, more complex and morally ambiguous, because Fate is suspect, the divine is fickle, multiplicitous, and the process of historification forces a recognition of the reality of imperfect rulers. The narrative is still structured as Epic / Heroic, but we may see it in saga form rather than monomyth, focused on multiple flawed heroes / heroines. Less of a Quest here, more of a Struggle for the Kingdom, more war and rebellion, intrigue and subterfuge. There is no clear line between this and the previous group though. To what extent is the world of Tigana idyllic rather than baroque? To what extent is the world of The Lord of the Rings baroque rather than idyllic? To what extent do secondary world fantasies present a struggle between these two aesthetics?
Wherever we draw the line, if we view this type as a reconstruction of the previous, it too can be reconstructed, in turn, by downscaling from Epic to Heroic...
Neo-Primitive World (to be Conquered)
- Planetary Romance -- A Princess of Mars, Slave Girl of Gor
- Swords & Sorcery - Conan, Jirel of Joiry, Fahfrd and the Gray Mouser
- Post-apocalyptic - Hiero's Journey
- Deconstruction - Elric of Melnibone, Shadow of the Torturer, Viriconium
It's interesting that here the secondary world may well be rationalised as another planet, a prehistoric past or a post-apocalypse future. And there's a corresponding slide from the wonders of the idyllic and the baroque here, to a sense of the world as existential wilderness, the moral vacuum of a wild world, all too human kingdoms ruled by all too human powers. The Epic quest is replaced by Heroic mission(s), the narrative structured as episodic adventure, focused on the Romantic hero as noble savage or honest rogue. Ultimately this is deconstructed in the New Wave by the full-on anti-heroism of Decadent protagonists, writers seeking to directly critique the reactionary politics of the genre, the fascism of power-fantasy, or even, in Harrison's case, the whole aesthetic foundation of secondary world fantasy.
So what next?
Modern Archaic World (to be Rediscovered)
- American Gothic - Something Wicked This Way Comes
- Contemporary Fantasy -- Mythago Wood, American Gods
- Urban Fantasy - War for the Oaks, Moonheart, Bones of the Moon
- Dark Fantasy - Pillars of the World, Interview With a Vampire
- Occult Adventure -- Declare, Last Call, The Club Dumas
- Supernatural Romance -- Anita Blake
- Pastiche / Parody - Fool on the Hill
This group takes a different tack. Here myth, folklore and fable are used to construct a secondary level to reality, a realm hidden beyond or within the contemporary world. Legend is remade as secret history. Our backdrop, then is the "post-magic" world of modernity. It seems only natural that the resultant theme here is the resurgence of the repressed, the uncovering of the cryptic (the message being that our world is itself, secretly, a locus of wonder). We see the return of the Gothic here via that occultism, but we also see it merging with more contemporary modes of Romance -- adventure, thriller, romance in the Harlequin sense. The narrative is generally structured as an Adventure / Mystery of some sort, though. As such it inherits those heroes, the innocent cynics, the mundanes who are not born to Epic / Heroic destinies, modern everymen who think they understand the world until they are suddenly faced with the return of the archaic.
And what about SF?
Colonialist Frontier World (to be Saved / Won / Conquered)
- Prototypes - The Skylark of Space, The Lensman series
- Juvenile -- Tom Swift, Podkayne of Mars
- Space Opera - The Mote in God's Eye
- Epic SF - The Stars My Destination, Dune, Nova, Fire Upon the Deep
- Future-Historical SF - Foundation
- Alien Invasion - War of the Worlds, Footfall
- Politico-Economic -- The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
- Crypto-political Thriller - Consider Phlebas
- Military SF - Starship Troopers, A Hymn Before Battle, Honor Harrington
- Alternate History - The Guns of the South
Here we see space as the secondary world scaled up, the future as idyllic / baroque / neo-primitive backdrop for all sorts of Epic / Heroic / Adventure / Mystery narrative. Super-advanced technological artefacts, as Objects of Power, imbue this new frontier with wonder, but that frontier is also a place of threat. An innocent Earth may become the victim of colonialist aliens, an idyll to be saved. Peaceful Earth colonies may be the targets of imperialist Terrans or the local savages, a kingdom to be won or a territory to be conquered (though the politics of this may be glossed over). So we get narratives structured as monomythic quest, power-struggle saga, episodic mission or cryptic thriller. Given the colonialist frontier thematics at play here it's no surprise that the field of SF incorporates a return to the romantic roots of all this -- the War of Independence, the Civil War, the Wild West, the Indian Wars -- in Alternate History so often focused on the (re)construction of America.
Which leads us to another group of types of SF, one overlapping with the field of Fantasy...
Industrial Baroque/Grotesque World (to be Understood)
- Future Fantasy - The Martian Chronicles
- Social satire -- The Space Merchants, The Reproductive System
- Drug culture -- The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
- Metaphysical - Lord of Light, Ubik, Valis
- New Wave -- Cornelius Quartet, Dangerous Visions
- Cyberpunk - Neuromancer
- Steampunk --The Anubis Gates
- New Weird - Perdido Street Station, The Etched City, The Physiognomy
- Clockpunk -- Mainspring
- Transhumanist - Accelerando
Here space, the future or an alternate history represents the modern world made strange, a baroque / grotesque backdrop for the sort of Epic / Heroic / Adventure / Mystery narratives discussed above. The use of technology here may also be as an Object of Power or a MacGuffin. But this is a post-Promethean world, an industrial, capitalist, consumerist, information age world where the everyman is hero.
Because the real frontier is closed, Bradbury's fiction becomes an elegy for it. And because we are now in the Age of America's Empire we see the introduction of satiric and Noir narratives as critique of its culture, from Sladek through to Gibson. We see the counter-culture manifest in everything PKD ever wrote. We see postmodernity in the New Wave & slipstream disruptions of linear narrative. As we enter the post-industrial era we see the use of Gothic and Victorian Adventure to (re)construct a lost industrial idyll. The Information Age wonders of Singularity fiction, it should be noted, could be considered a sort of idyllic / baroque / grotesque depending on one's level of investment in the dream of transcendence; you could see the futureshock of modernity in there or a new frontier myth.
Ultimately this group too can be reconstructed by removing Romantic narrative structures, adopting a social naturalist dynamics:
Conceptual World (to be Survived)
- Prototype - The Machine Stops
- Technological -- Rogue Moon, Rendezvous With Rama
- Socio-political - The Left Hand of Darkness, Double Star, The Female Man
- Utopian -- Lost Horizon, The Dispossessed, Shikasta
- Heterotopian -- Trouble on Triton
- Dystopian - 1984, Native Tongue, The Handmaid's Tale
- Apocalyptic -- Dahlgren
- Post-apocalyptic - A Canticle for Leibowitz, The Drowned World
- Psycho-social- The Time Traveler's Wife, Flowers for Algernon
- Metaphoric - Gormenghast
- Metaphysical - The Lovely Bones
Reality, here, is reconfigured by a conceit. The world is a modern or postmodern "strange land" to be... lived in. Romantic narrative structures are therefore rationalised or reconstructed entirely to social naturalist narratives of a protagonist confronted with that reconfiguration, struggling to survive. Conceits of technological innovation, socio-political development, environmental catastrophe and personal transformation can be made concrete in SF. Metaphoric and metaphysical conceits can be made concrete in Fantasy. Any sort of story, ultimately, can be told using the technique of the hypothetical, counterfactual or metaphysical conceit extended throughout the narrative.
Strange Fiction Unbound
That last point is crucial, I'd say. It's worth repeating, I think, that none of the above is intended as any sort of schema of how this or that "sub-genre" intrinsically "is" like these but "is not" like those others. Rather what I'm trying to unpack here is the aesthetics and narrative structures these variant types of strange fiction seem to vaguely adhere to as writers riff off the previous generations, to gravitate towards, the forces as much as the forms.
I suspect the exceptions are as wide-spread as the examples in many respects. In each group and sub-group one can expect to see a set of establishing works which were exceptional when they came out, works that might almost fit in another group or sub-group except that they take some novel twist of an approach, a turn in another (generally untrodden or less trodden) direction. Then one can expect to see a set of works inspired by these which consolidate the group or sub-group by developing the themes; and these would shade into that set of works which are basically just derived, taking that approach as a formula, becoming symbolic formulation.
Then, of course, you get a new set of exceptional works which kinda sorta might almost fit into that group or sub-group, except that they take some new turn along the way and set off in another direction, and the whole process starts all over again.
Or they might switch streams, so to speak. A neo-primitive, post-apocalyptic, swords & sorcery novel could easily bring a Conan-style hero suddenly into a baroque setting (an enclave of Renaissance-level culture and Medici/Borgia style intrigue), and shift the whole narrative structure up a gear into Epic by making it a struggle for civilisation. It could shift the focus again by introducing a sense of the idyllic, a potential to get "through" all that baroque complexity and make the world whole again, even introducing a sense that the hero is in fact Chosen for that role.
The point is, nothing here is meant to be taken as a discrete essential form that a writer has to select and then write the story as an example of. Instead, these are the rough, vague outlines of forms that some writers have at some point selected to work within, the symbolic formulation tracing out that outline over and over again. Any writer might take one outline but... colour outside the lines, creating a new variant of the form to be outlined by subsequent copyists. They might overlay multiple outlines and complexify the work that way. They might totally cut-up and fold-in multiple templates. Or whatever.
With the latter two groups, it seems, the overlap between them is pretty strong. There's no reason, for example, that the industrial baroque/grotesque aesthetic couldn't be constructed entirely from contemporary (post)modernity, for example. It's largely, I think, a not-so-indirect way of talking about our world anyway, so one could simply take, say, American Suburbia and skew it into something weirder, stranger, bring out the baroque grotesquery of the existing culture. David Lynch does this, as do many of the New Wave writers and it's a strategy you see a lot of in the new New Wave (slipstream, interstitial, New Wave Fabulist, and so on).
Then take away the sort of Mystery plot structure you have in Twin Peaks, leaving only the conceit you've overlaid on reality in order to bring out the strangeness of it, and you have the Conceptual, where the protagonist is cut loose from a traditional Romantic narrative path (like "uncovering the secret truth") and may end up just stumbling about trying to deal with this (post)modernity on a domestic level. That's the sort of tack you might well see a lot of Kelly Link stories as taking.
You could argue that the Cornelius Quartet does this actually, starting out with a Romantic narrative structure in which Jerry is the Hero in an Adventure narrative structure, breaking that up into episodic sub-structures (which are fine within the Heroic / Adventure form), but gradually, as the episodes progress, stripping away the Heroism, transforming the Adventure into a domestic drama... Jerry as a spotty adolescent wannabe in a scuzzy London that's virtually Eastenders.
Ultimately, strange fiction is unbound, limited only by its own choices -- to follow this path or that, or to strike out into unexplored territories. At this point in its history, with all these forces acting within it, we have one field of many forms, and sometimes a fabulous formless complexity. Vibrant and dynamic, that strange fiction is spilling out of the ghetto and into the mainstream. This is not, I think, surprising.
Hal Duncan
Hal Duncan is a Scottish science fiction and fantasy writer based in Glasgow. A graduate of Glasgow University, his first book, Vellum, about a war between heaven and hell, was released by Pan in summer 2005. It has since been translated into several other languages and nominated for the World Fantasy Award and Locus Award. Ink, the follow up, was released in February 2007. You can find his blog over at http://notesfromthegeekshow.blogspot.com/
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