36. Omitted pages from an sf noveclass="underline"
“You know,” Sam said pensively, “that explanation of mine this evening — about the gravity business?” They stood in the warm semidark of the co-op’s dining room. “If that were translated into some twentieth- century language, it would come out complete gobbledy-gook. Oh, perhaps an sf reader might have understood it. But any scientist of the period would have giggled all the way to the bar.”
“Sf?” Bron leaned against the bar.
“‘Scientification?’ ‘Sci-fi?’ ‘Speculative fiction?’ ‘Science fiction?’ ‘Sf?’—that’s the historical progression of terms, though various of them resurfaced from time to time.”
“Wasn’t there some public-channel coverage about —?”
“That’s right,” Sam said. “It always fascinated me, that century when humanity first stepped onto the first moon.”
“It’s not that long ago,” Bron said. “It’s no longer from us to them than from them to when man first stepped onto the American shore.”
Which left Sam’s heavy-lipped frown so intense Bron felt his temples heat. But Sam suddenly laughed. “Next thing you’ll be telling me is that Columbus discovered America; the bells off San Salvador; the son buried in the Dominican Republic…”
Bron laughed too, at ease and confused.
“What I mean — ” Sam’s hand, large, hot, and moist, landed on Bron’s shoulder — ”is that my explanation would have been nonsense two hundred years ago. It isn’t today. The épistèmé has changed so entirely, so completely, the words bear entirely different charges, even though the meanings are more or less what they would have been in — ”
“What’s an épistèmé?” Bron asked.
“To be sure. You haven’t been watching the proper public-channel coverage.”
“You know me.” Bron smiled. “Annie shows and ice-operas — always in the intellectual forefront. Never in arrears.”
“An épistèmé is an easy way to talk about the way to slice through the whole — ”
“Sounds like the secondary hero in some ice-opera. Melony Épistèmé, costarring with Alona Liang.” Bron grabbed his crotch, rubbed, laughed, and realized he was drunker than he’d thought.
“Ah,” Sam said (was Sam drunk too…?), “but the épistèmé was always the secondary hero of the sf novel — in exactly the same way that the landscape was always the primary one. If you’d just been watching the proper public channels, you’d know.” But he had started laughing too.
37. Everything in a science fiction novel should be mentioned at least twice (in at least two different contexts).
38. Text and textus in science fiction? Text, of course, comes from the Latin textus, which means “web.” In modern printing, the “web” is that great ribbon of paper which, in many presses, takes upwards of an hour to thread from roller to roller throughout the huge machine that embeds ranked rows of inked graphemes upon the “web,” rendering it a text. Thus all the uses of the words “web,” “weave,” “net,” “matrix,” and more, by this circular “etymology” become entrance points into a textus, which is ordered from all language and language-functions, and upon which the text itself is embedded.
The technological innovations in printing at the beginning of the sixties, which produced the present “paperback revolution,” are probably the single most important factor contouring the modern science- fiction text. But the name “science fiction” in its various avatars — sf, speculative fiction, sci-fi, scientification — goes back to those earlier technological advances in printing that resulted in the proliferation of “pulp magazines” during the twenties.
Naming is always a metonymic process. Sometimes it is the pure metonymy[39] of associating an abstract group of letters (or numbers) with a person (or thing), so that it can be recalled (or listed in a metonymic order with other entity names). Frequently, however, it is a more complicated metonymy: old words are drawn from the cultural lexicon to name the new entity (or to rename an old one), as well as to render it (whether old or new) part of the present culture. The relations between entities so named are woven together in patterns far more complicated than any alphabetic or numeric listing can suggest: And the encounter between objects-that-are-words (e.g., the name “science fiction,” a critical text on science fiction, a science-fiction text) and processes-made-manifest-by-words (another science-fiction text, another critical text, another name) is as complex as the constantly dissolving interface between culture and language itself. But we can take a model of the naming process from another image:
Consider a child, on a streetcorner at night, in one of the earth’s great cities, who hears for the first time the ululating sirens, who sees the red, enameled flanks heave around the far building edge, who watches the chrome-ended, rubber-coated, four-inch “suctions” ranked along those flanks, who sees the street-light glistening on the red pump-housing, and the canvas hose heaped in the rear hopper, who watches the black- helmeted and rubber-coated men clinging to their ladders, boots lodged against the serrated running-board. The child might easily name this entity, as it careers into the night, a Red Squealer.
Later, the child brings this name to a group of children — who take it up easily and happily for their secret speech. These children grow; younger children join the group; older children leave. The name persists — indeed, for our purposes, the locus of which children use and which children do not use the name is how we read the boundary of the group itself.
The group persists — persists weeks, months, years after the child who first gave it its secret term has outgrown both the group and its language. But one day a younger child asks an older (well after the name, within the group, has been hallowed by use): “But why is it a Red Squealer?” Let us assume the older child (who is of an analytical turn of mind) answers: “Well, Red Squealers must get to where they are going quickly; for this reason sirens are put on them which squeal loudly, so that people can hear them coming a long way off and pull their cars to the side. They are painted with that bright enamel color for much the same reason — so that people can see them coming and move out of their way. Also, by now, the red paint is traditional; it serves to identify that it is, indeed, a Red Squealer one sees through the interstices of traffic and not just any old truck.”
Satisfying as this explanation is, it is still something of a fiction. We were there, that evening, on the corner. We know the first child called it a Red Squealer out of pure, metonymic apprehension: there were, that evening, among many perceived aspects, “redness” and “squealing,” which, via a sort of morphological path-of-least-resistance, hooked up in an easily sayable/thinkable phrase. We know, from our privileged position before this text, that there is nothing explicit in our story to stop the child from having named it a Squealing Red, a Wah-Wah, a Blink-a-blink, or a Susan-Anne McDuffy — had certain nonspecified circumstances been other than the simplest reading of our fiction suggests. The adolescent explanation, as to why a Red Squealer is a Red Squealer, is as satisfying as it is because it takes the two metonyms that form the name and embeds them in a web of functional description — satisfying because of the functional nature of the adult épistèmé,[40] which both generates the functional discourse and of which, once the discourse is uttered, the explanation (as it is absorbed into the memory, of both querent and explicator, which is where the textus lies embedded) becomes a part.
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40
The épistçmé is the structure of knowledge read from the epistemological