I feel the science-fictional-enterprise is richer than the enterprise of mundane fiction. It is richer through its extended repertoire of sentences, its consequent greater range of possible incident, and through its more varied field of rhetorical and syntagmic organization. I feel it is richer in much the same way atonal music is richer than tonal, or abstract painting is richer than realistic. No, the apparant “simple-mindedness” of science fiction is not the same as that surface effect through which individual abstract paintings or particular atonal pieces frequently appear “impoverished” when compared to “conventional” works, on first exposure (exposed to, and compared by, those people who have absorbed only the “conventional” textus with which to “read” their art or music). This “impoverishment” is the necessary simplicity of sophistication, mete for the far wider web of possibilities such works can set resonating. Nevertheless, I think the “simple-mindedness” of science fiction may, in the end, have the same aesthetic weight as the “impoverishment” of modern art. Both are manifestations of “most works in the genre”—not the “best works.” Both, on repeated exposure to the best works, fall away—by the same process in which the best works charge the textus—the web of possibilities—with contour.
The web of possibilities is not simple—for either abstract painting, atonal music, or science fiction. It is the scatter pattern of elements from myriad individual forms, in all three, that gives their respective webs their densities, their slopes, their austerities, their charms, their contiguities, their conventions, their cliches, their tropes of great originality here, their crushing banalities there: the map through them can only be learned, as any other language is learned, by exposure to myriad utterances, simple and complex, from out the language of each. The contours of the web control the reader’s experience of any given s-f text; as the reading of a given s-f text recontours, however slightly, the web itself, that text is absorbed into the genre, judged, remembered, or forgotten.
In wonder, awe, and delight, the child who, on that evening, saw the juggernaut howl into the dark, named it “Red Squealer.” We know the name does not exhaust; it is only an entrance point into the textus in order to retrieve from it some text or other on the contours, formed and shaped of our experience of the entities named by, with, and organized around those ono-mal metonyms. The textus does not define; it is, however slightly, redefined with each new text embedded upon it, with each new text retrieved from it. We also know that the naming does not necessarily imply, in the child, an understanding of that textus which offers up its metonyms and in which those metonyms are embedded. The wonder, however, may initiate in the child that process which, resolved in the adult, reveals her, in helmet and rubber raincoat, clinging to the side-ladders, or hauling on the fore—or rear-steering wheel, as the Red Squealer rushes toward another blaze.
It may even find her an engineer, writing a text on why, from now on, Red Squealers had best be painted blue, or a bell replace that annoying siren—the awe and delight, caught pure in the web, charging each of her utterances (from words about, to blueprints of, to the new, blue, bonging object itself) with conviction, authenticity, and right.
Everything in a science-fiction novel should be mentioned at least twice (in at least two different contexts), with the possible exception of science fiction.
Saturn’s Titan had proved the hardest moon to colonize. Bigger than Neptune’s Triton, smaller than Jupiter’s Ganymede, it had seemed the ideal moon for humanity. Today, there were only research stations, the odd propane-mine, and Lux—whose major claim was that it bore the same name as the far larger city on far smaller Iapetus. The deployment of humanity’s artifacts across Titan’s surface more resembled the deployment across one of the gas giants’”captured moons”—the under-six-hundred-kilometer hunks of rock and ice (like Saturn’s Phoebe, Neptune’s Neriad, or a half-dozen-plus of Jupiter’s smaller orbs) that one theory held to have drifted out from the asteroid belt before being caught in their present orbits. Titan! Its orangeish atmosphere was denser (and colder) than Mar’s—though nowhere near as dense as Earth’s. Its surface was marred with pits, rivers, and seas of methane and ammonia sludge. Its bizarre life-forms (the only other life in the Solar System) combined the most unsettling aspects of a very large virus, a very small lichen, and a slime mold. Some varieties, in their most organized modes, would form structures like blue, coral bushes with, for upwards of an hour at a time, the intelligence of an advanced octopus. An entire subgenre of ice-operas had grown up about the Titan landscape. Bron despised them. (And their fans.) For one thing, the Main Character of these affairs was always a man. Similarly, the One Trapped in the Blue, Coral-like Tenticles was always a woman (Lust Interest of the Main Character). This meant that the traditional ice-opera Masturbation Scene (in which the Main Character Masturbates while Thinking of the Lust Interest) was always, for Bron, a Bit of a Drag. And who wanted to watch another shindo expert pull up another ice-spar and beat her way out of another blue-coral bush, anyway? (There were other, experimental ice-operas around today in which the Main Character, identified by a small “MC” on the shoulder, was only on for five minutes out of the whole five-hour extravaganza, Masturbation Scene and All—an influence from the indigenously Martian Annie-show—while the rest was devoted to an incredible interlocking matrix of Minor Characters’ adventures.) And the women who went to them tended to be strange—though a lot of very intelligent people, including Lawrence, swore Titan-opera was the only really select artform left to the culture. Real ice-opera—better-made, truer-to-life and with more to say about it via a whole vocabulary of real and surreal conventions, including the three formal tropes of classical abstraction, which the classical ice-opera began with, ended with, and had to display once gratuitously in the middle—left Lawrence and his ilk (the ones who didn’t go into ego-booster booths) yawning in the lobby.