This might be a strange post, but bear with me and I shall see you through to the light.
I have been reading a very wide assortment of novels of late; most of them are science fiction, and I've been diving high and low and catching up with the history of the genre, but such a spree has also been interspersed with Literature with a capital L. Call it a postgraduate's late realization that there are several classics he has taken for granted, or just a way to prepare for the (possibly) upcoming Subject GRE. Call it what you will; but its been firing my brain cells with a few ideas I'm certain better men than me have dealt with in far greater detail and with far greater joy.
Let's take two science fiction authors and put them side by side: Dan Simmons and Philip K Dick. If you look at Hyperion, its possibly the epitome of the science fiction pastiche. Simmons is so thoroughly read in the genre that he is the literary chameleon par excellence in genre fiction. As a critic at Tor.com has rightly pointed out, it has Blish, Heinlein, Le Guin...all the possible flavours you could want in a self conscious tribute to SF. But its far more than a self conscious tribute: its also a whole new story in itself. Like Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun, it dabbles generously in the history of the genre (though perhaps, not as obliquely as Wolfe, whose reference to Campbell's Twilight I realized much much later, probably on my third read through of his magnum opus), and yet is very much its own creature. This, in spite of it being also a nod to Chaucer; Wolfe, as we all know, is obviously indebted to Proust for his style.
I have read elsewhere that if science fiction is to be ever considered literary, then a book like Wolfe's is probably the way to go. Only grand themes, it seems, such as memory, sin and redemption, are deemed worthy of literary respectability. Hyperion, in that respect, revels far too much in Simmon's element, a gratuitous flair for singling out the potentially horrific in any given scenario, to be deemed grand. Or is it?
I have mentioned a particular quote of Darko Suvin's before in this blog that I agree with wholeheartedly: we get the science fiction we deserve. I will risk being idiosyncratic and subjective and say here that whenever someone asks me to cite examples of science fiction as Literature, the first three books that have always come to mind have been The Left Hand of Darkness, Solaris and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Not Wolfe. Not Fifth Head of Cerberus, not The Book of the New Sun, and not at all because some call the latter Fantasy and not SF. I am of the opinion that SF is very much a sub-branch of Fantasy, but one rooted, necessarily so, in the present. Like all great literature.
Which brings us to the aforementioned three. What do the three have in common? Le Guin's style comes closest to what might some call 'literary': a certain high handed prose, an inclination towards the poetic, and a measured grace that certainly brought about a major upheaval of priorities in SF. But its literature not because of those criteria alone: it has the capability, at times, to suddenly break out of the web a novel has to weave around itself, and get at something visceral. Like the last line, when Genly Ai's asked by a young Gethenian about other planets. That single line still sends chills down my spine, like the world of Gethen would if I were to visit it. The sudden bits and pieces of Gethenian myth intermittently spread throughout the novel adds a certain immediacy approaching the unbridled, chaotic intimacy and intricacy of Life itself.
The Left Hand of Darkness is as much about gender as it is about storytelling, and its grandiloquent sureness of style is rooted in that very pleasure of storytelling. It might be a polemic, like The Dispossessed, but its also other things. It is very much genre, but it uses its trappings in an invisible enough manner so as not to impede the general reader. However, someone well versed in SF is welcome to find the many nods to genre the novel graciously allows.
Solaris is anti-science fiction, but you can never call it that and get away with it. It undermines all of early SF's claims, and questions the efficacy of an empirical world view in the first place. But again, like in Le Guin's novel, it also seems to tear away at its artifice, and breathe every now and then and become a new creature entirely. Such as, again, that last portion in the novel, where Kelvin attempts to communicate with the Ocean by raising his hand, and the ocean responds by encircling his hand in a bubble. That is sublimity in the face of doubt, and it is something not restricted to Science Fiction alone, although it might seem that way to people suddenly coming across Lem's book after a thousand other reads steeped in SF conventions.
There is nothing wrong with SF's conventions, of course, even its more commercial ones. It all depends on how you use them. Do Androids...? is a magnificent example. But the SF trappings give way, yet again, to that sudden moment that puts the entire novel and its themes in perspective. I'm referring to one particular scene, where one of the androids snips away at a spider's legs, one by one, and Isidore watches on in terror. This is Dick perhaps at his most exposed, or at the very least, one of the several such passages one may find in his novels. For instance, the quote China Mieville uses at the beginning of Perdido Street Station, taken from We Can Build You:
I even gave up, for a while, stopping by the window of the room to look out at the lights and deep, illuminated streets. That's a form of dying, that losing contact with the city like that.
These three works of genius are all flawed. Much like Shakespeare, whose plays are riddled with monologues which do nothing for the plot, but strain and break away from its causality. But it does so perhaps unconsciously: I don't think you can plan those lines, or set them out in plot beforehand to, as it were, dry.
Hyperion and The Book of the New Sun possesses magnificent writing, but when it strains against genre, it does so consciously. They hark back to a time that is not theirs to begin with. Again, that's not whats at fault. What is missing is that unconscious negation of artifice. Its all too perfectly etched. The style is too suggestive of grandeur to ever get at the inconsistencies or disillusions life is all about. Even when they talk about such things, they do so within a framework of a style that is out to prove SF's worth. SF does not need proving in that way. SF does a few things explicitly that canonical literature takes for granted. But in being explicit, it also has to cater to its own strengths. Writers mistake this for an opportunity to stay within genre while incorporating styles pioneered by mainstream writers (if I may call it that). But I think that takes away quite substantially from the sudden leaps of imagination, that sudden sentence that SF is perhaps uniquely capable of; that instance when a single line takes you out of your Self, and leaves you grappling at truths which fade away like a dream, albeit slower, till that next re-read.
