0. Editor’s Note

The Great Stratagem of Lady Ikedanbu — Judith Huang

I can’t love artificially I’m too busy falling for my electric kettle
— Cai Png

Cactus Girl, Lobster Boy
— Alastair Wee

The Girlfriend
— Andrew Cheah

Keep Nothing on Your Person
— Levin Tan

Singapore goes cyborg but what
does this mean for families?
— Darcel Al Anthony

Science City #26
— Joseph Tan

Tensile Strength
— S.L. Johnson

The Winter of Our Science-Fiction Discontent, Part 1
— Vivekanandan Sharan

Cutting the Sapphire: An Interview with Joan Hon, Singapore’s First Sci-Fi Novelist
— Ng Yi-Sheng

A Review: Club Contango by Elaine Boey (Dark Matter INK)
— Wayne Low

The Winter of Our Science-Fiction Discontent, Part 1

Vivekanandan Sharan

Vivekanandan Sharan is a third-year student studying at NUS. He can be found spending most of his time reading, taking notes and listening to music. He read Isaac Asimov's collection The Early Asimov when he was 16 and was never the same again. Currently trying to triangulate German Idealism, science fiction and his engineering major.

"Science Fiction" today is a lot like the contemporary Soviet Union; the sprawling possessor of a dream that failed. Science fiction's official dogma, which almost everybody ignores, is based on attitudes toward science and technology which are bankrupt and increasingly divorced from any kind of reality. "Hard-SF," the genre's ideological core, is a joke today; in terms of the social realities of high-tech post-industrialism, it's about as relevant as hard-Leninism.¹

Bruce Sterling wrote this thundering denunciation of science fiction in his 1989 essay “Slipstream”. It is because of this alleged failure of science fiction that he came up with the category of slipstream that would surpass science fiction; a new term, and more importantly, a new recognition for the inherent fluidity of texts that exceeded the bonds of genre and literary fiction. During the time that Bruce Sterling was writing, the Soviet Union – no longer the bastion of “hard-Leninism” (whatever that would mean) – was in the throes of perestroika and glasnost. June of that year would see the success of Solidarność in Poland, and by November, the fall of the Berlin Wall. In about two years the Soviet Union would have ceased to exist at all. If the Soviet Union did not climb out of its dream-state death throes back into the world of the real in the 1980s, what about science fiction?

Claims in the form of “the death of _” are almost always attention-grabbing. That’s because they impart a sense of the “end of history” into an argument, appealing to our loss-aversion. Sensational as they are, what makes these claims hard to shake off is that they are quite often true, from some points of view, under certain angles. It can be productive to debate these negative claims, since the process of determining what is true and what is not reveals a lot about what we consider crucial. Specifically, grappling with “the death of science fiction” can unearth conflicting notions about what it means for “science fiction” to be alive and well, or rather, to be anything at all.

¹ https://www.journalscape.com/jlundberg/page2

James Blish and SF-pessimism

We start this story of death with the classic science fiction author and vibrant critic, James Blish. Today, he is most well known for his novelization of Star Trek: The Original Series episodes, and his four-part saga, Cities in Flight. Much less well known is his critical work, written under the pen name of William Atheling Jr. Collected in two invaluable volumes, The Issue at Hand (1964) and More Issues at Hand (1970), Blish presented a unique modernist orientation to the genre, and made contact between science and modernist literary fiction. While he admired the works of canonical writers like James Joyce and Ezra Pound, Blish published in pulp magazines like Future Science Fiction, Science Fiction Stories and Galaxy Science Fiction in the 1940s and the 1950s. Blish stages a contact between these two poles of culture, in which we can discern, avant la lettre, a theoretical description of the contemporary strain of science fiction, which bears directly on the question at hand.

In his 1978 essay, “Probapossible Prolegomena to Ideareal History”, Blish takes issue with two strands of critical thought surrounding science fiction at the time. In the first strand, works such as The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Odyssey, and Frankenstein are put forward in an attempt to legitimise science fiction by showing it to be an eternal literary mode. In the second strand, any proto-history of the genre is thrown out like the proverbial bathwater, leaving “science fiction” as the baby hurtling through the air.

Blish agreed with neither the urge (among scholarly and popular writers) to trace a genealogy for science fiction, nor the attitude that science fiction is sui generis, and took form “with the advent and rise of science and technology”.² To him, both positions were merely inverses of each other, results of a linear mode of historical thinking.
Instead of these models, Blish proposes a non-linear, cyclical, historical schema to house science fiction, drawing from the German historian Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West. In Spengler’s historical schema, each culture passes through life stages not unlike an organism, from birth to youth to senescence to death. Two figures can be contemporary even if they are separated by great gulfs of space and time, as long as they lived in the corresponding phases of their cultures.

Blish, as did Spengler, believed Western Civilization had reached the winter of its discontent. The West is nearing its fall and so exhaustion permeates all its cultural work. In literature, for example, the secondary-epic of the West has already been written in John Milton; now is not the time for an enterprising Virgil, let alone another Homer.³ Nothing on the stature of either can be written today. To Blish,that the broader scope of literature itself has been exhausted; what can be written has already been written. Literature as a whole has grown decrepit, death following with no chance of rejuvenation. In this state, science fiction itself cannot have great expectations put on it. We certainly cannot expect science fiction to be more than what it already is, an attitude he considers an untenable utopianism.

Blish has a pessimistic attitude, certainly, about what science fiction can aspire to. There is no prelapsarian moment of science fiction that we can return to, and no salvation that would raise it to the level of the old masters. The content of science fiction is such that it cannot be raised in that way, given that its two sources, a degenerate science and a degenerate religiosity, are conditions of the current period of the West.⁴

Modern historians have found Oswald Spengler’s historical metaphysics overwrought, reactionary and distorting, preferr not to use enormous overarching frames and grand theories, preferring instead to be grounded and empirical. Unlike Blish, I do not a priori decide that science fiction is inherently “syncretic” or decadent. Nevertheless, Blish’s appropriation of Spengler’s thought for literary criticism is useful for the lovely description that he comes up with for science fiction: “the internal (intracultural) literary form taken by syncretism in the West”, namely “that occult area where a science in decay (elaborately decorated with technology)” is combined with a second religiousness.

It is because of the results of this “syncretism” that we see “non-ideas” such as “time travel, ESP, dianetics, Dean Drives, faster-than-light travel, reincarnation and parallel universes” find such comfortable homes in SF. Blish is arguing that these patent and fantastical impossibilities are inseparable from the essence of science fiction. What is useful about Blish’s pessimism is that it is his claim that literature is dead in the West today that can make way for the new life and new form of science fiction. Blish affirms SF as a syncretic “degenerate” form, such that instead of continuing with nostalgia for original purity, authors can embrace wholly the nature of the genre and try making something new.

This definition feels strikingly contemporary when we look at popular kinds of science fiction in the media. The list of “non-ideas” that Blish mentioned are not only still used, but have become cliché even for mainstream audiences. Surely the average moviegoer is familiar with time travel and alternate universes from the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies, ESP from shows like Stranger Things, and faster-than-light travel from any number of space opera films, like Star Wars and Star Trek. As images they have become shorthand. What seems to run through these examples is what James Blish calls “syncretism”, which I think is useful for understanding how contemporary science fiction functions.

²“Probapossible Prolegomena to Ideareal History” in The Best of James Blish, pg. 350

³ For Blish, the secondary-epic is the self-conscious attempt at a literary, written epic poem, based on an older, traditional oral epic. Virgil based the Aeneid on Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, while Milton’s Paradise Lost was modelled on Homer and Virgil. The primary epic of Western civilization would probably be Beowulf or The Song of Roland.

⁴ He depicts this in the first book of the Cities of Flight series, They Shall Have Stars (1956), in a dystopian 2013 with a police-state America, degenerating science and a religious revival. The series as a whole is permeated with Spenglerian themes, as R. D. Mullen shows in his afterword to the Cities in Flight omnibus.

Tropes and Syncretism

Modern readers will probably be aware of the endless debates over “tropes”. Tropes are commonly defined as the eternal, shared themes, forms and motifs that have been passed down for generations, and pre-date even writing itself. However, in the midst of this heated discussion, it strikes me that “trope”, or “trope-y” is not the right word to talk about modern mainstream science fiction, whether that’s the Marvel Cinematic Universe or contemporary novels. We have presented a probable critique of science fiction in James Blish, now, how do we find a way to account for the way that SF has changed through Blish’s critical keyword?

To be precise, I argue that it is not the prevalence of tropes that marks modern mainstream science fiction (as stated in the definition above, there have always been tropes), but rather, their mode of circulation in the cultural sphere. Taking inspiration from Blish's reference to syncretism above, I argue that the modern incarnation of the trope can be thought of as an icon, or a sign that is abstracted from their original context. In this case, the 'original context' refers to whatever dramatic tension that characterized the genre of science fiction in its nascent stages. Even if Blish’s definition might not apply to science fiction as a whole, I argue that it applies to a particular contemporary mode of speculative fiction.

There are two processes here: firstly, there is a stagnant science, whose objects become re-enchanted and fetishized in science fiction, forming the stock of non-ideas like faster-than-light travel, time travel and telepathy. There is a further process, however, where the used-up signifiers of science fiction themselves become re-enchanted as objects of fetish.

The purest examples of this can be found outside science fiction proper, in popular culture. Let’s take the recent Marvel Cinematic Universe movie Thunderbolts, which is a great example of the re-enchantment of dead tropes. The movie itself reveals itself to be a retread of the older Avengers movies, ending up as a reprise of them. The movie itself juxtaposes figures like gods, spies, magic, but slotting them as interchangeable figures in a plot. This is what makes it pre-childish, because a child would be interested in playing with the bare juxtaposition, “Character X and Character Y appeared together!” rather than even having fun with it.

Science fiction now presents like a set of images, which includes “aliens”, “outer space”, “cyborg”, “space fleet”, whose appeal is mostly immediate. The space fleet in one story is about the same as the space fleet in another story, which means that new works can be created through mixing and matching images from different sources, crossing mediums. By adopting this point of view, we can contend that just because tropes are losing their contexts in modern science fiction, that doesn’t mean that science fiction has somehow lost its life force. Instead, something about it has qualitatively changed.

This criticism is not new to us, and can be attributed to Brian Aldiss in 1986, apropos of Ray Bradbury, but applies just as well to the motivation of the New Wave, which Aldiss was associated with.

On the whole, the props of SF are few: rocket ships, telepathy, robots, time travel, other dimensions, huge machines, aliens, future wars. Like coins, they become debased by over-circulation (though it is true that some of them, adroitly used, acquire baraka by long association).⁵

However, what is unique about this criticism in our contemporary instance is that signs seem to not have been “debase[d]”, but have simply lost their function. It’s not just that these signs have become degraded, they have become ironic, and part of a different game this time: use all these images in new combinations. The dramatic effect engendered by the tropes is no longer the point, it’s the use of the tropes themselves and the new arrangements they are put into.

It is not impossible to revitalize the dead tropes, though, and the best example is in Grant Morrison’s series Multiversity for DC Comics. It is a multiverse-story, and so it depends primarily on the trope-y variations of a mythologized set of characters. However, despite writing a work that is in this way incredibly syncretic (taking characters and tropes from various genres, like superhero fiction, fantasy, science fiction), Morrison is able to make it work, through a meta-fictional exploration of these trope variations instead.

So, borrowing Blish’s idea of “syncretism”, we can orient our readings of SF against different “death of…” claims, searching out for what it is, really, that matters to us about SF. Doing so can also shine light on another crucial aspect in SF: what is SF really?

⁵Brian Aldiss, Trillion Year Spree, pg. 305-306

Part 2 continued in Issue #3