Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions Read Online Free PDF Page A

and the great cult psychology movements of the seventies have taught us—want out of the world. Strong people want in. Strong people want to, must deal with life as it is presented. Science fiction is a literature for the weak, the defenceless, the handicapped and the scorned. Panacea and pap.
    Barry N. Malzberg
     
    SF, we are told, is all about the tropes, the conventions of structures and symbols. This is what genre is, how it works, through conventions born of copying (conventions changed, perhaps, subverted by alterations introduced during the process of copying, but essentially still copies of copies). SF is recognised as SF by these conventions, sold as SF on the basis of these conventions, and bought as SF for these conventions. It is identified by these tropes of character, background and other such trappings, and by the plot-structures which these tropes are fitted into like symbols in a formula, variables in an equation. This is SF as symbolic formulation, the form that many who do not read deeply within the field are most familiar with.
    To talk of this symbolic formulation as distinct from other genres is mi sleading however. Functionally speaking, the formulae of one genre can be utilised with the symbols of another, and vice versa. They often are. Symbols may even be mixed and matched in order to simulate originality by offering an unexpected hybrid form. Again this is often the case. The heroic gunmen, hard-bitten detectives and villainous cads of Western , Crime and Romance are shamelessly filched. Frontier idylls collide with the city streets of Noir . The noble heroes of War Fiction die on the battlefields of elsewhens. The New Weird may have already been declared dead, but it’s not unlikely, I’d suggest, that some editor is right now reaching into the slush pile to find some symbolic formulation masked as it, with mushroom people and cactus people clicked into place in old equations.
    This symbolic formulation uses formulaic plots and tropes generated by ev ery genre imaginable, deriving itself from its antecedents, codifying the iconographies of dragons and spaceships, hackers and computer viruses, rendering these so familiar in movies and television that for the general public they define the genre. The movies and TV are, of course, generally a few steps behind. If this type of fiction grabbed its tropes from cutting-edge works in the other SFs it might be incomprehensible to readers unfamiliar with those tropes. So Hollywood is still appropriating the 1950s vision of the Rocket Age and the 1970s vision of Future Catastrophe, utilising the marvellous and/or monstrous imagined fruits of scientific advance to offer the viewer that roller-coaster ride they want. (Michael Crichton seems to be on a mission from God in this respect.) Cyberpunk tropes had to filter into the cinematic zeitgeist before The Matrix could be made. In five years’ time or so we might expect to see some crappy Hollywood schlockbuster using the Singularity, but at the moment, I think, it would run up against a “not an instantly graspable trope” barrier. Otherwise, however, this type of “brain out, sponge in” fiction is done so well in movies that it may well be poaching customers from the written media. Why should we read a book when we can see the gosh-wow SFX on a silver screen?
    Symbolic formulation may take its prefab plans and components from di fferent suppliers but they are still taken off-the-shelf. There is a craft in putting the formulation together, picking and choosing the right set of symbols, knowing what will work with what—and the process of formulation may be both analytic and synthetic, not simply following the codified structures of a known formula but rather actively formulating them, codifying those structures from a genuine understanding of what this or that individual work have in common, how they work in the same way, how that can be replicated—but at the end of the day if the symbols are