Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions Read Online Free PDF

basically interchangeable, if others could be used without affecting the basic structure, then symbolic formulation is using its conceits in a largely cosmetic manner.
    One might, however, argue that the definition of this process of SF does not specify failure of that process. Nor does it specify the exclusion of effects or processes definitive of other modes of SF as parallel and related activities within a single text. Many works of this SF, we might argue, utilising the most familiar tropes and the most formulaic plots, may nevertheless function simu ltaneously on other levels by also applying the features which characterise the other SFs. Symbolic formulation may be derivative hackwork but it is only so in the absence of any real creative activity. Add the joy and novelty of fancy, the architecture and texture of fabrication, the significance and resonance of fabulation, and you have something meatier. Add a little science, a little soul, a little spectacle and you have something juicer. Add any of the features of these other SFs to the most basic symbolic formulation and you are adding flesh and blood to its skeletal frame.
    The inverse is also true, however. All of the other SFs stand the risk of d escent into symbolic formulation where these features are neglected. Michael Moorcock, in Wizardry and Wild Romance , comments on the creation and the reuse of incredible imagery, as metaphor or as mere symbol:
     
A writer of fantasy must be judged, I think, by the level of inventive intensity at which he or she works. Allegory can be nonexistent, but a level of conscious metaphor is always there. The writer who follows such originals without understanding this produces work which is at best superficially entertaining and at worst meaningless on any level—generic dross doing nothing to revitalize the form from which it borrows.
    Michael Moorcock
     
    Still, copying is not an inherently doomed approach, is even perhaps a ne cessary part of learning how to write well. And the problems of this pulp product are so obvious that maybe a little devil’s advocacy is in order here. After all, by taking apart the SF work that’s gone before and putting it together in new ways, the symbolic formulation which can result in mechanical and derivative formulaic hackwork if the writer has no drive to understand and to improve, can and does also feed into the processes of these other SFs, when the writer’s aim is not simply to replicate the familiar in order to exploit the market for “more of the same,” but instead to recast it.
    Here copying becomes critique—pastiche or parody. It may be used to sati ric ends as with Sladek’s take on Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics in his novel Tik-Tok , clearly a world away from the Hollywood formulation of I, Robot where the familiar MacGuffin of the Three Laws is co-opted into a standard “Mad Computer in Control of the House” story—c.f. Demon Seed , 2001 , and so on down to episodes of both The X-Files and The Simpsons . Where the Hollywood adaptation clicks a maverick cop firmly into place in the formulated “Discover What’s Going on and Stop It” plot, Sladek decides to give us the robot’s point of view, and formulation is transformed to fancy, fabrication and fabulation.
    Symbolic formulation is a part of SF, one of many processes at work in what we typify as SF, but this mechanical reuse of the old equations is by no means as characteristic of the diverse field of SF as the general public pe rceives it to be. SF is an intrinsically eclectic field, a magpie’s nest of a bookshelf where the A-Z of authors runs from Aldiss to Zelazny. And as the symbolic formulation sloughs off into the Media section or the cinemas or the TV screens, what we are left with as the heart of written SF may well be best described in terms of these approaches rather than in terms of conventions.
    This is where the next definition may be a little contentious.
     

Strictured Fantasia
     
Science