Category: Classmate’s Contribution

This blog post Bradley is an interesting examination of another section of Delany’s text. Instead of my focus on subjunctivity, Bradley instead talks about how individual words in science fiction develop the ideas of “speculative fiction.”

Question 1- Delany’s “About 5,750 Words” by Bradley Cisternino

At first, I was a little confused by Delany’s terminology, as he uses the term “Speculative Fiction,” however I believe that term is either synonymous with or encompasses science fiction. He outlines Speculative Fiction in a number of ways. The key points are (to me) as follows: Speculative Fiction deals with things that have not happened (with accompanying subcategories.) It is not the style or the content which makes SF, but the information itself and how it is presented as an image to the reader. Content as a concept is misunderstood: the words do not create content necessarily, it is the meaning of words when strung together which create the image and story for the reader. I found the following quote to be incredibly striking: “A sixty-thousand word novel is one picture corrected fifty-nine thousand, nine-hundred and ninety-nine times.” I consider this, together with the earlier point, to be Delany’s definition of Science/Speculative Fiction. He goes on to explain this point by constructing a sentence word-by-word, noting the large difference between the image of the sentence as each word is added. He also notes differences between styles and how they can entirely change the meaning/effect of a sentence when referencing the Gurney/Trench translations. Each is a translation of the same text and each sentence should theoretically be about the same thing. However, in practice, they appear entirely different and one is far more effective than the other.
The advantage of this approach (to me) is that it forces one to look both holistically and engage deeply with a given text simultaneously. While you still get the broad image and concepts of the story effectively, you can trace back individual images and points to specific individual WORDS rather than paragraphs or chapters. I can’t say I’m an avid SF reader, however I have read my fair share of it as well as other fiction types, and I’ve never even thought about or tried doing that. With Delany’s approach, it seems not only possible, but easy. Something I disagree with, though, is the narrowness of a story that Delany creates. Does a sixty-thousand word novel really have to be just one picture continuously updated? I can agree that each word has a significant contribution to a larger image, however I’m not sure it’s all the same image they’re contributing to. Instead, I think it would be better presented as a series of different images (or a collage, if you will) that are interconnected in sequence, each building off of the image before it. I think it may narrow the story down too much if it is constrained to a single individual image, as it may cut out or confuse other concepts or themes that are in the novel. This is especially important because most novels, including Science Fiction, will almost always have multiple themes, settings, and overarching concepts.

This blog post by Quinn Hughes focuses on something that Delany would later explain in his interview over his novel Trouble on Triton. The word “kippleization” is a neologism. Science Fiction uses these neologicisms are a core tool to create the images need for cognitive astrangement.

Sentence:
“It’s a universal
principle operating throughout the universe; the entire universe is moving toward a final state of total, absolute kippleization.”

In this sentence, an extremely important topic that pertains to the entire subject of the novel comes up. The entire story is based on a catastrophic post-war world regarding human civilization as we know it. While I’ve only read to chapter 13 at this point of writing this, I can assume that “World War Terminus” as the novel coins it, was a devastating nuclear war that can be evident by examples of “fallout” and “brain damage from the dust”. Furthermore, when focusing on the character of Isidore, we find someone who appears to be far worse off than Rick. Isidore who recently meets a girl named “Pris”, explains to her that “kipple” is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers or yesterday’s homeopape. When nobody’s around, kipple reproduces itself. For instance, if you go to bed leaving any “kipple” around your apartment, when you wake up the next morning there’s twice as much of it. It always gets more and more”. I include this long quote sheerly for the reason that Kipple in essence, as the way that I interpret its meaning within the novel, is the inevitable doom of how unlivable planet earth as become. The “kipple” is essentially the means to an eventual end that you truly cannot control without human interference. Without such interaction with the “kipple”, the planet will continue to continue, and get worse and worse. It’s almost as if the “kipple” is a side effect of the nuclear fallout and destruction post “World War Terminus”. For further clarification regarding what “kippleization” truly is, we can also look at an excerpt that Rick states, saying that “the entire planet had begun to disintegrate into junk, and to keep the planet habitable for the remaining population the junk had to be hauled away occasionally . . . or, as Buster Friendly liked to declare, Earth would die under a layer – not of radioactive dust – but of “kipple”. Perhaps “kipple” is a more friendly word that suppresses that sheer grimness of the reality surrounding the planet?

This blog post by John D’Aquino and the essay On defining sf, or not: Genre theory, sf, and history by Rieder, as John says, are a perfect summary of our work in class.  It ties the ideas of cognitive estrangement, speculative fiction, neologisms and tautologies, and the identity of science fiction all together.

The text by Rieder is in my opinion, a great summary of everything we have gone over so far in the class. I think it’s apt that he points out towards the beginning that genre is a rather tricky thing to define. While “it” is not an actual thing that exists in the world, either tangibly or in an intangible, observational sort of way, it is up to us to both invent and define it.I am basically simplifying what I believe the point of his first two observations about sf are, but I think that because genre is a thing that people have invented and are also constantly working on and adding to, it becomes immune to one fixed definition. As Rieder states, we have the option to look at it in a tautological way and simply state that sf is whatever we deem to be sf. Tautologies, while seemingly useless as logical statements, actually have some merit here. If we start from the viewpoint of being able to name anything we like as sf, then we can take a more adaptive approach that causes us to run into less trouble than if we set up a rigid framework for definition first. One thing this has made me think of however, all jokes that have been made about this topic aside, is Star Wars. There seems to be some contention whenever the question is brought up of “is Star Wars real sf?”. But following many of the commonalities that have been associated with sf, I feel drawn to make the comparison. As for cognitive estrangement, I think this is accomplished perfectly, in a way that almost seems meta. Because admittedly, Star Wars does feel very different from most other sf that we have read or watched. Setting it in a time long before our own, in some obscure galaxy far away from ours does a number on the usual way we think of such stories. But a long time ago still means that the events occur on our timeline, and “far far away” still means they occur in our universe. To me there’s not much difference between a story of a far-off empire that has nothing to do with our world today and, say, the story of two planets with diametrically opposed political systems that have nothing to do with our own planet as we see in The Dispossessed. The most interesting comparison I’d like to draw though is towards the concept of the Novum. I don’t think Star Wars’ novum is the Force, or lightsabers, or even FTL travel. I think the ubiquity of technological advancement which can do seemingly impossible things, to the point where literally every character in the galaxy has access to some type of awe-inspiring power is the novum. Because in such a seemingly advanced world, its people still are subject to problems which are as old as civilization itself; corruption, religious superstition, war, poverty, and oppression are all parts of the story. This has been a long detour, but to bring it back around to a discussion of Rieder’s essay, I’d like to point out that the fact that I have just had to make and substantiate an argument for why a certain work is sf speaks to the amorphous nature of the genre itself. This accredits the notion that sf is what we say it is, and we can choose to apply any definitions that we think deserve it. There may come a day where sf is hardly recognizable from what it looks like today, just as works like the Netflix anthology Love, Death, and Robots is hardly recognizable from Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein.