Cyfy Pomo?

Eric Rabkin

Dept. of English
University of Michigan
esrabkin@umich.edu

 

Ketterer, David. Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy. Indiana University Press, 1992. ix + 206 pp. $27.50 cloth.

 

McCaffery, Larry, ed. Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Fiction. Duke University Press, 1991. xvii + 387 pp. $17.95 paper.

 

. . . The review was the color of an electron spinning to the frequency of anti-matter . . .

 

“Love and Napalm: Export U.S.A.” shouts two simultaneous stories: in boldface, a three-sentence poster series of incestuous desire, erotic violence, and the military-industrial complex; intercut, five pages of media-spawned obsessive need for dripping flesh, mass mind control, mechanical sex, and orgasmic death. This is but one of the “compressed novels” in J.G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition (1967), a precursor text for both David Ketterer and Larry McCaffery.

 

In ancient China, the followers of Mozi (c. 479-381 B.C.E.) believed that all judgments should rest on the distinction between usefulness and uselessness, but Zhuangzi (c. 369-286 B.C.E.) offered the parable of “The Useless Shu Tree.” Huizi complained that the huge Shu tree was too twisted to yield planks and too mottled to yield veneer. Zhuangzi replied that from the tree’s viewpoint these were useful traits because all the other trees in the forest had long since been cut down to make planks and veneer. Better, Zhuangzi advised, to find a different use for the tree, to sit beneath it and to rest in its shade.

 

The books by Ketterer and McCaffery may look like they should be read, cover to cover, page by page. They should not. If it is useful to speak of readable and writable texts, perhaps it is also useful to speak of consultable and compilable texts. Telephone directories are both. Ketterer’s anthology of Canadian fiction is consultable; McCaffery’s “casebook” is compilable.

 

In our postmodern times the ideology of realism has come increasingly under attack, and Canadian literature, no less than British or American literature, has turned increasingly to various nonrealistic and metafictional forms--which frequently include, or approximate, SF and fantasy. The present visibility of Canadian SF and fantasy, then, is largely attributable to the dissolution of the realistic paradigm.(Ketterer 3)

 

Promise A: There will be a demonstration that Canadian literature has turned increasingly to F&SF. Discharge: A book-length narrative catalog–arranged in chapters by language (English and French) and historical period (e.g., before and after the 1984 publication of William Gibson’s Neuromancer!) and genre (F and SF), peppered by the occasional connected, often insightful, page or two on a single work (e.g., Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale)–showing that there is more Canadian F&SF, but no comparison is made with total Canadian literary production. Perhaps the country is simply producing more everything as means of production improve and population increases. Harlequin Books, after all, is Canadian.

 

Promise B: There will be a demonstration that this Canadian generic turning arises from a postmodern assault on realism. Discharge: Canadian F&SF has ever more prominent practitioners (Gibson, Elizabeth Vonarburg) and Canada’s best known authors have turned from time to time to F&SF (Atwood and occasional passages by Robertson Davies and Margaret Laurence), but Gibson is a native of the U.S., Vonarburg of France, and the three native Canadians have returned to realism.

 

Promise C: There will be a demonstration that Canadian literature has “present visibility.” Discharge: The heart of cyberpunk, the putative SF projection of postmodernism, is Neuromancer, but “there’s nothing here linking Gibson to any Canadian tradition” (143). Hail, Ballard!

 

“What makes for the very best Canadian SF and fantasy does not have anything to do with Canada at all” (166).

 

Whazza matter, Bucky? You say we have a non-subject? You say you want to yawn? You say you can’t imagine reading a hundred and sixty-six pages about F&SF in Canada that offer little extended argument and omit the magical Robert Kroetsch (e.g., What the Crow Said, 1978)? Well, listen up, ’cause this book has the most helpful Bibliography around on its targets and a cleverly detailed Table of Contents and a pretty darned good Index and you can use ’em all to track down languages and periods and genres and read just what the doctor ordered OR follow up on any of the twenty biggest Names, and, believe it or not, there are twenty–count ’em–twenty: Margaret Atwood, David Cronenberg, Robertson Davies, Charles de Lint, Gordon Dickson, William Gibson, Herbert L. Gold, Phyllis Gotlieb, Guy Gavriel Kay, W.P. Kinsella, Margaret Laurence, Stephen Leacock, Laurence Manning, Judith Merril, Brian Moore, Spider Robinson, Robert Service, William Shatner, A.E. van Vogt, Elisabeth Vonarburg. And a diverse and estimable bunch they are.

 

Yeah, yeah, half these folks moved away from Canada and nearly half moved to it and some are only Big Names in g-e-n-r-e (de Lint, Robinson) and others are overpraised (Kay is not really Tolkien’s equal, except in annual sales, at least not yet), but think about it: van Vogt is indisputably one of the formative forces in ghetto SF of the “Golden Age” 1940s; Cronenberg’s Videodrome and The Fly and Dead Ringers make a body of F&SF film second only, if at all, to Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove and 2001 and The Shining; Gold’s editorial work was second only to that of John W. Campbell in determining the directions of SF; Shatner (with the help of Ron Goulart) actually can write a serviceable novel or two; Vonarburg was the first person outside France (and the first woman) to win France’s annual SF award; etc. Think of the poetry (Atwood, Gotlieb, Service)! Think of the humor (Leacock, Robinson)! Think of the movies (Cronenberg, Kinsella’s Field of Dreams)! And maybe think about folks you never thought of before. Consult this book.

 

[A] the challenge of finding a suitable means to examine the 'postmodern condition' has produced a vigorous and highly energized response from a new breed of SF authors who combine scientific know-how with aesthetic innovation . . . [B] aesthetically radical SF exhibiting many of the features associated with postmodernism are evident as early as the mid-1950s and early 1960s, when literary mavericks like Alfred Bester, William S. Burroughs, J.G. Ballard, Philip K. Dick, and Thomas Pynchon began publishing books that self-consciously operated on the fringes of SF and the literary avant-garde. [C] During the 1970s and 1980s [writers such as Don DeLillo, Ted Mooney, Joseph McElroy, Denis Johnson, Margaret Atwood, William T. Vollman, Kathy Acker, and Mark Leyner], [w]hile writing outside the commercial SF publishing scene . . . produced works that perfectly fulfill the generic task of SF, described by Vivian Sobchack as 'the cognitive mapping and poetic figuration of social relations as these are constituted by new technological modes of "being in the world"' [D] . . . these mainstream novels (recently dubbed 'slipstream' novels by cyberpunk theoretician Bruce Sterling) typically portrayed individuals awash in a sea of technological change, information overload, and random--but extraordinarily vivid--sensory stimulations."(McCaffery 9-10)

 

And so on. [A] (the guide letters are my insertions) ain’t quite right. The new breed of SF writers with technical know-how typically doesn’t write cyberpunk or anything remotely like it: David Brin, Robert Forward, James Hogan. And on the other prosthesis, Gibson is famous for having been inspired to write Neuromancer by watching folks in video arcades; he’d never even touched a computer before writing THE BOOK. But there are confirming examples: Rudy Rucker (mentioned by McCaffery) and, by some definitions, Gregory Benford (unmentioned).

 

[A] and [B] are mutually inconsistent. But, hey, postmodernism frees us from history, right, Bucky?

 

[B] is the giveaway: no distinctions made between Bester and Burroughs, Dick and Pynchon. But where oh where is Stanislaw Lem? What happened to Kobo Abe? McCaffery’s implicit polemic: there is a theory (mostly francophone but with some anglophones connected via conference calling) to support a world-wide (North Atlantic) movement that transcends genre (like SF or mainstream) and Genre (like fiction and music). Cyberpunk is its bleeding pump (speaking of Kubrick, anyone remember A Clockwork Orange?) and postmodernism is its daytime name.

 

[C] don’t have no SF writers. Mainstreamers trip in the ghetto, but do the ghettees ever wash in the mainstream? Sure: Abe, Lem, George Lucas (of American Graffiti), Lewis Shiner (of Slam), Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (of late). But McCaffery ignores ’em ’cause they don’t help the cause. The original cyberpunkers–Gibson, Shiner, Sterling, et al.– were for a while called The Movement. McCaffery’s cause? To convince us that The Movement is the movement.

 

[D]: the slipstream is Pierian. And the rest of the “casebook” (poor Gibson hero that he is, that hard Case: he gets used by every slash body) sets out to do it.

 

Five sections, very nice: Introduction, Cyberpunk 101: A Schematic Guide to Storming the Reality Studio, Fiction and Poetry, Non-Fiction, Bibliography.

 

Zhuangzi say, “The Introduction is the most useful part of the book.” (Maybe that’s why Russell Potter assigns this one in his course called “The Transit of the Fantastic: From the Gothic to the Postmodern”). McCaffery writes with the clash and bristle of the slipstream and takes us through a plausible polemic about the conflation of MTV, fragmented fiction, decentered subjects, artificial bodies, and soft machines, and about the need for a new fiction in Third Stage Capitalism (Frederic Jameson is always right). It’s a trip and a half and you come back either truly believing (tant pis) or really juiced to think about all this stuff. (I’ll take what’s behind door number two.)

 

The “schematic guide” is “a quick list of the cultural artifacts that helped to shape cyberpunk ideology and aesthetics, along with the books by the cyberpunks themselves, in roughly chronological order” (17). Every “artifact” gets its paragraph blast (blurb is too weak a word). The paragraphs do not connect logically. Does anyone still care? They connect imagistically. Frankenstein (for brooding sexuality and love of body parts). Red Harvest (noir is noir). Society of the Spectacle (’cause they do theory right). Dub Music (duh). Never Mind the Bollocks (so that is the Sex Pistols’ best album!). Dawn of the Dead (so cannibalism, so?). MTV (how not?). Big Science (and here is Laurie Anderson when we need her). And so on. For more than a dozen pages. If you think you missed something on the way from George Eliot to George Romero, McCaffery in under half an hour will let you know what you might want to back and fill up on.

 

Then comes the Fiction and Poetry anthology. Some of the short stories are finds (Pat Cadigan’s “Rock On”), and most of the pieces taken from books (as about two-thirds are) are cleverly enough extracted to be okay for tasting, but overall, what can you do with this collage? I’ve got it! Let’s give it to a lit class. You know, the kind that can’t read whole books? Nah. Better: let’s put it on reserve. Collage might work for postmodern artists but it doesn’t work here as postmodern crit. Nice touch, though: half the folks represented are “slipstreamers” and half SFers. The polemic rocks on.

 

No SFers in the Non-Fiction anthology, though, except for McCaffery’s interview with Gibson and Sterling’s “Preface” to Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology. (There are others, you know, like Norman Spinrad.) This time we get more complete works, some of them quite useful, like Darko Suvin’s solid “On Gibson and Cyberpunk” and Takayuki Tatsumi’s fascinating “The Japanese Reflection of Mirrorshades” and George Slusser’s wide-ranging “Literary MTV.” But you know that urban legend making the rounds, the one about the guy in a strange city who thinks he’s “getting lucky” but wakes up two days later drug-muzzy and with a tiny band-aid on his back? They stole his kidney! It’s cyberpunk on the streets. Well, the Big Names in this book need to feel their backs. McCaffery has extracts from Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Jameson, Jean-Francois Lyotard, et al.

 

I’ve got it! Let’s put it on reserve.

 

Funny, isn’t it, that with all this theorizing in French, all the fiction and poetry is in English? Hey, David, tell this guy about Elisabeth Vonarburg.

 

And the Bibliography will keep you reading for years, if the imagistic polemic has you swinging that way.

 

So, this was a compilable book. And I, for one, enjoy it: another day, another dollop.

 

Ketterer’s book you can read when you need to; McCaffery’s when you want to. They both well repay dipping, each “after his kind” (Genesis 7:14).

 

“The Heat Death of the Universe” (Pamela Zoline, 1967) is a postmodern, cyberpunk fiction (that no one ever called those names) in fifty-four numbered paragraphs (just like a PMC review) that run a shining riff on housework and entropy. Here is number 2:

 

Imagine a pale blue morning sky, almost green with clouds only at the rims. The earth rolls and the sun appears to mount, mountains erode, fruits decay, the Foraminifera adds another chamber to its shell, babies' fingernails grow as does the hair of the dead in their graves, and in egg timers the sands fall and the eggs cook on.

 

I wonder what criticism will look like in ten years?