What It Is We Do When We Read Science Fiction by Paul Kincaid
Paperback, vi + 365 pages, £15, Beccon Publications
*
reviewed by Jonathan McCalmont
Books by critics, much like critics themselves, tend to exist along a spectrum. At one end we have books that are the fruits of a particular reviewing gig such as Dave Langford’s Critical Assembly. We then pass through looser collections of reviews such as John Clute’s Scores before encountering mixtures of abstract theory and concrete critical essays such as Freedman’s Critical Theory and Science Fiction before arriving at works of almost pure theory such as Darko Suvin’s collection Positions and Presuppositions in Science Fiction or Takayuki Tatsumi’s Full Metal Apache.
As you might expect of someone who has written both for fanzines and academic journals, Kincaid is somewhere in the middle with a little bit of theory, a lot of criticism and hardly any reviews. This means that WIIWDWWRSF is ideally situated for someone who is looking to think a little bit more about his SF without necessarily getting bogged down in theoretical jargon.
The book opens with its titular piece. Kincaid’s academic background is in philosophy and here he tries to look at SF through the theoretical lens of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (or what analytical philosophers loftily refer to as ‘the later Wittgenstein’). In particular, Kincaid considers the role of genre compound words and neologisms such as ‘vidcall’ or ‘genemod’ and how these words can be alien to us while still communicating information about the world. So while the word ‘genemod’ might not exist in our version of english, we have the ‘gene’ and we can work out that ‘mod’ is probably short for ‘modification’ suggesting that ‘genemod’ might refer to some kind of genetic engineering. Indeed, the use of compound words to defuse something’s Otherness is quite common in the fantasy lexicon where something as odd as a magical sword (is it just sharper than a normal sword or what?) becomes comprehensible the second we learn that its name is Foe Hammer... the thing you use to hammer your foes. Even the Simpsons have commented upon this phenomenon by having Middle Eastern food sound less daunting simply referring to felafel as ‘crunch patties’. This is undeniably a good observation but I do regret that Kincaid did not push his analysis of what is clearly one of genre writing’s key techniques. For example, China Mieville is a consummate user of compound words but in works such as Iron Council he also seems to deconstruct the technique by using compound neologisms not to defuse the Otherness of his creations, but rather to heighten them. Are there other examples of this technique being subverted or used differently? It would be nice to see the ideas in this article expanded in order to answer such questions.
The second piece is a more playful work. Entitled ‘On the Origins of Genre’ it considers a question that traditionally opens critical works about SF, namely “What is Science Fiction?”. This piece again shows Kincaid’s roots in philosophy as it argues that there are no necessary and sufficient conditions for something to be SF and that it follows from this that there is no original, Ur-text that started the genre. Kincaid’s approach is, again, rooted in the later Wittgenstein and his conception of family resemblances. The idea that Wittgenstein is most famous for is arguably the theory that a word’s meaning is fixed by its use (so if everyone started using the word ‘blue’ to denote red things, the word ‘blue’ would soon come to mean red). A key practical implication of this theory is that we do not walk around with clear ideas of what words mean, rather we have vague ideas. This means that a lot of the time we are able to identify something as belonging to a certain type without necessarily being able to fix the boundaries of that type with a clear definition. Wittgenstein’s example is of a game; we know what a game is when we see one but ask any of us to give a definition of the word ‘game’ without false positives or negatives and we’d be stuck. Kincaid argues that we have all read enough SF to know SF when we see it, but it does not follow from this that the term has a clear definition. Indeed, we all agree that The Time Machine is SF but we’re less clear on whether Cormac McCarthy’s The Road or Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicom also fall within the genre. This idea is not as controversial as it might once have been. Indeed, Farah Mendlesohn in the Introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction (a work she co-edited with Edward James) defines genre as a conversation between generations of writers. Both conceptions of SF lapse onto the idea that the boundaries of the genre are constantly shifting and redrawn in an idiosyncratic manner by generations of authors and critics and that, as a result, it makes little sense to try and nail down any kind of definition. Which, given the subject of the following articles, was probably always going to be Kincaid’s position.
‘How Hard is SF?’ and ‘The New Hard Men of SF’ deal with Hartwell and Cramer’s hard SF anthologies The Ascent of Wonder : The Evolution of Hard SF and The Hard SF Renaissance. The inclusion of both pieces is interesting as Kincaid’s objections to both books are effectively identical; not only are a lot of the stories not hard SF, but both collections lack any kind of coherent vision of what hard SF might be that could include all of the stories that get included. The pieces effectively walk through the various stories and editorial definitions and either accepts them, rejects them or comments on whether they’re good enough to be included in the collection. This is a methodology Kincaid also deploys in ‘Heterotopic Borders’, his response to Larry McCaffery’s book on cyberpunk Storming the Reality Studios. All three essays are well put together and drip with a real sense of frustration but it is interesting to examine this methodology (a common one in dealing with sub-genre specific anthologies) in the context of Kincaid’s views on family resemblance. Kincaid’s account of Cramer and Hartwell trying on a series of inadequate definitions of hard SF seems almost comical when one assumes that there is a correct definition for the term, but if one instead views them as attempts to vocalise a sense of family resemblance then they make perfect sense.
Indeed, the idea of there being such an entity as “science fiction” or “hard SF” or “cyberpunk” is one that is not grounded in reality but in pragmatism. These labels exist in so far as they help us select what books to read, where to put those books in the shops and what to think of those books when we are reading them but any attempt at framing a genre or a sub-genre is always going to boil down to that sense of family resemblance. They are always going to be inadequate, irrational and idiosyncratic. Kincaid is happy to admit this in his theoretical pieces but is he not skewering Cramer, Hartwell and McCaffrey for doing what he suggests is unavoidable; giving not a definition but rather some kind of vague impression of a family resemblance? Possibly but then this merely opens up a further question... how does one discuss that sense of family resemblance?
I would argue that Kincaid provides us with a blue-print for this kind of take on definitional questions in ‘Anatomising Science Fiction’. Nothing less than a review of Clute and Nicholls’ vast Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction, Kincaid chooses to limit himself to tracking down Clute and Nicholls’ definition of SF. Not really bothering with the question of whether or not their definition is correct, Kincaid simply describes some of the protocols and guidelines that have clearly informed the Encyclopaedia. “This is just one version of science fiction” [page 28] he says and he’s quite correct. If one buys into the idea of a family resemblance rather than a definition, it follows that the reviewer’s task is not to evaluate whether the stories are all hard SF or not, but rather to present to the reader an account of how the editors have defined the term.
The theoretical works dealt with mostly in the opening sections, the book then relaxes into a series of themes. One theme is the work of Christopher Priest (who gets four pieces devoted to him), another the work of Gene Wolfe (who also gets four) and various attempts to track down the essence of British SF including ‘Mistah Kurtz, He Dead’ a justifiably acclaimed piece that states that the ur-text of British SF is Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and ‘Islomania? Insularity?’, a piece that attempts the characterise British SF in terms of its obsession with islands.
The pieces on Christopher Priest and Gene Wolfe are interesting but lacking much experience of either author, I am not really in a position to engage with Kincaid’s takes on them though I will note that Wolfe is also, famously, a favourite of John Clute’s and one might wonder whether Wolfe’s writing might be, like Bergman’s films, particularly well adapted to the thought processes of critics.
The essays on the essence of British SF are both undeniably thought provoking (though Kincaid missed out D.H. Lawrence’s ‘The Man Who Loved Islands’) but one can’t help but wonder the extent to which these theories will hold for the future of SF. In a promotional BSFA interview with Graham Sleight, Kincaid pointed out that recently British and American SF might have swapped places leaving British writers prone to writing about the big issues while American SF becomes increasingly obsessed with the death of their own way of life. Might authors who have grown up with a more multicultural and fragmented experience of Britain not produce qualitatively different SF? indeed, it will be interesting to see in five or ten years whether online geek culture can produce its own strain of SF in the manner that Britain once did, or would British SF remain British SF even with the internet?
Other notably interesting pieces include Kincaid’s take on Borges in ‘Entering the Labyrinth’, which stresses not only Borges’ rejection of realism but also his obsession with labyrinths and mirrors that distort reality. ‘The North-South Divide’ is a piece about the different counterfactual histories of the American Civil War. The piece is so extensive that it comes close to giving an overview of the civil war simply by pinpointing the works that have been written about other possible outcomes. This reminded me of a project theatre critic Ken Tynan once tried to get off the ground, a history of World War II through the films that have been made about it. ‘Forever Haldeman’ is a notable piece as it is the only review in WIIWDWWRSF that comes close to a rant as Kincaid expresses increasing distress and frustration at the fact that Haldeman’s later books bear little resemblance to the earlier ones that made his name. Also worth looking out for is ‘A Mode of Head-on Collision’ all about the Australian critic and author George Turner.
What It Is We Do When We Read Science Fiction contains over thirty pieces of top-notch criticism running from the review to the theoretical essay. All of the individual pieces are worthy of your time and, as this review suggests, thought provoking in the extreme. The only reservation I have about the book is that the context of the articles is stuck at the end of the book so you have to keep flipping back to work out when the piece was written and whether it was a review that wandered or a wider piece to start off with. However, the decision to present all of the articles with simply their titles does lend the pieces a certain timeless quality that would not have emerged had we been constantly reminded of when and where the articles first appeared.
"In a promotional BSFA interview with Graham Sleight, Kincaid pointed out that recently British and American SF might have swapped places"
I wanted to cite this for the write-up of the survey I've been doing, so I went and tracked down the original citation, which is NYRSF 157, September 2001, as part ofa response to Judith Berman's essay "Science Fiction without the Future".
Posted by: Niall | October 04, 2009 at 06:24 PM
nice one Niall. I'll have to track that piece down as it has always struck me as a rather wonderful observation.
Posted by: Jonathan M | October 06, 2009 at 01:39 PM