Free Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions by Hal Duncan Page B

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A flash of lightning illuminated the object, and discovered its shape plainly to me; its gigantic stature, and the deformity of its aspect, more hideous than belongs to humanity, instantly informed me that it was the wretch, the filthy daemon, to whom I had given life.
    Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
     
    This is a lightning bolt that smashes Rationalism, revealing the wilderness of Gothic nightmare and the monstrum that stalks it. One equilibrium ruptured is reality, as with the novum. We are dealing here with the sort of shift in subjunctivity level Delany talks of, the reanimated creature being a technical impossibility: this could not have happened. We are dealing with the incredible. But in Shelley this is of trivial import as set against the rupture of a different stability: affective equilibrium.
    If we map the novum to the shift in subjunctivity level, eschewing the Co ntingency Slip Fallacy, with its wishful thinking in which the impossible is cast as possible, that novum is a conjuring of what cannot be—not yet—inspiring incredulity. Trace that wishful thinking to the rose-tinted spectacles of sense-of-wonder, a willingness to hoodwink ourselves in our sneaky yearning that the novum should be, and we find we’re dealing also with a fiction, at its heart, of the marvellous, inspiring desire. What Shelley offers is the opposite. The monstrum is a conjuring of what must not be, inspiring dread, and where a Rationalist might argue the novum sound, reasonable for all its technical impossibility, the Romantic sets the monstrum as the murder of reason, the bloody hand of the sublime.
    This is a lightning bolt that will one day sear right through the genre, a sha ttering crack of irrationalism that will split it right in two. You can still see the crack in the wall of the SF Café where a seismic futureshock ran through it on the day the beatniks moved in with their garb as black as their European espresso. But we’ll come to that. For now…for me, Shelley sits awkwardly in the role Aldiss ascribes her.
    Would Verne or Wells stand as better origin points? Is it not at least fair to talk of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea or The War of the Worlds as Science Fiction ? Again, these are understandable as science fiction, but are they Science Fiction ? At the end of the day, these are both works which, like The Stooges with punk, fit the aesthetic criteria but sit outside the historical context; they are Protomodern works, written in that distant time before the walls went up around the ghetto of Genre. They are clearly formative influences, taproots of Science Fiction , but they exist as experiments within their own genres, at a point when the term Science Fiction had not even been coined, and it’s inevitable that they will be widely viewed as such, just as The Stooges are most commonly viewed as a garage band, and for good reason. Ultimately if we want to conjure the history that shaped the territory, a narrower context lays a less dubious foundation for our back-story of descent. So we’ll treat Verne and Wells as embryonic, situated in that period of gestation before Science Fiction proper was born and named.
    That birth and naming begins with the pulps, with Gernsback’s scientifi ction. In those early decades before the SF Café was even built there was not one Genre but a whole host of them, where the Protomodern adventure story was gradually being transformed into the mass market Modern Pulp narrative. One Nick Carter dime novel in 1886 begets Nick Carter Weekly which becomes Detective Story Magazine in 1915; that same magazine publishes Arthur Conan Doyle but it does so alongside the Shadow. The publisher, Street & Smith Publications (who bought Astounding in 1933, funny enough), also gave us comics like Doc Savage and Air Ace , Western magazines like Buffalo Bill Stories and True Western Stories . Edgar Rice Burroughs gives us John Carter and Tarzan of the Apes in 1912, both via All-Story Magazine ,