Science Fiction was named in like manner to the Red Squealer; in like manner the metonyms which are its name can be functionally related:
Science fiction is science fiction because various bits of technological discourse (real, speculative, or pseudo) — that is to say the “science”—are used to redeem various other sentences from the merely metaphorical, or even the meaningless, for denotative description/presentation of incident. Sometimes, as with the sentence “The door dilated,” from Heinlein’s Beyond This Horizon, the technological discourse that redeems it — in this case, discourse on the engineering of large-size iris apertures, and the sociological discourse on what such a technology would suggest about the entire culture — is not explicit in the text. Is it, then, implicit in the textus? All we can say for certain is that, embedded in the textus of anyone who can read the sentence properly, are those emblems by which they could recognize such discourse were it manifested to them in some explicit text.
In other cases, such as these sentences from Bester’s The Stars My Destination, “The cold was the taste of lemons, and the vacuum was the rake of talons on his skin… Hot stone smelled like velvet caressing his skin. Smoke and ash were harsh tweeds rasping his skin, almost the feel of wet canvas. Molton metal smelled like water trickling through his fingers,” the technological discourse that redeems them for the denotative description/presentation of incident is explicit in the text: “Sensation came to him, but filtered through a nervous system twisted and shortcircuited by the PryE explosion. He was suffering from Synaesthesia, that rare condition in which perception receives messages from the objective world and relays these messages to the brain, but there in the brain the sensory perceptions are confused with one another.”
In science fiction, “science”—i.e., sentences displaying rhetorical emblems of scientific discourse — is used to literalize the meanings of other sentences for use in the construction of the fictional foreground. Such sentences as “His world exploded,” or “She turned on her left side,” as they subsume the proper technological discourse (of economics and cosmology in one; of switching circuitry and prosthetic surgery in the other), leave the banality of the emotionally muzzy metaphor, abandon the triviality of insomniac tossings, and, through the labyrinth of technical possibility, become possible images of the impossible. They join the repertoire of sentences which may propel textus into text.
This is the functional relation of the metonyms “science” and “fiction” that were chosen by Hugo Gernsback to name his new pulp genre. He (and we) perceived that, in these genre texts, there existed an aspect of “science” and an aspect of “fiction,” and because of the science something about the fiction was different. I have located this difference specifically in a set of sentences which, with the particular way they are rendered denotatively meaningful by the existence of other sentences not necessarily unique to science fiction, are themselves by and large unique to texts of the sf genre.
The obvious point must be made here: this explanation of the relation of the two onomastic metonyms Science/Fiction no more defines (or exhausts) the science-fictional enterprise than our adolescent explanation of the relation of the two onomastic metonyms Red/Squealer defines (or exhausts) the enterprise of the fire engine. Our functional explanation of the Red Squealer, for example, because of the metonyms from which the explanation started, never quite gets around to mentioning the Red Squealer’s primary function: to put out fires.
As the “function” of science fiction is of such a far more complex mode than that of the Red Squealer, one might hesitate to use such metonyms — ”function” and “primary”—to name it in the first place. Whatever one chooses to name it, it cannot be expressed, as the Red Squealer’s can, by a colon followed by a single infinitive-with-noun — no more than one could thus express the “primary function” of the poetic enterprise, the mundane-fictional, the cinematic, the musical, or the critical. Nor would anyone seriously demand such an expression for any of these other genres. For some concept of what, primarily, science fiction does, as with other genres, we must rely on further, complex, functional description:
The hugely increased repertoire of sentences science fiction has to draw on (thanks to this relation between the “science” and the “fiction”) leaves the structure of the fictional field of sf notably different from the fictional field of those texts which, by eschewing technological discourse in general, sacrifice this increased range of nontechnological sentences — or at least sacrifice them in the particular, foreground mode. Because the added sentences in science fiction are primarily foreground sentences, the relationship between foreground and background in science fiction differs from that of mundane fiction. The deposition of weight between landscape and psychology shifts. The deployment of these new sentences within the traditional sf frame of “the future” not only generates the obviously new panoply of possible fictional incidents; it generates as well an entirely new set of rhetorical stances: the futureviews-the-present forms one axis against which these stances may be plotted; the alien-views-the-familiar forms another. All stories would seem to proceed as a progression of verbal data which, through their relation among themselves and their relation to data outside themselves, produce, in the reader, data-expectations. New data arrive, satisfying and/or frustrating these expectations, and, in turn and in concert with the old, produce new expectations — the process continuing till the story is complete. The new sentences available to sf not only allow the author to present exceptional, dazzling, or hyperrational data, they also, through their interrelation among themselves and with other, more conventional sentences, create a textus within the text which allows whole panoplies of data to be generated at syntagmatically startling points. Thus Heinlein, in Starship Troopers, by a description of a mirror reflection and the mention of an ancestor’s nationality, in the midst of a strophe on male makeup, generates the data that the first-person narrator, with whom we have been traveling now through a hundred and fifty-odd pages (of a two-hundred-and-fifty-page book), is non-caucasian. Others have argued the surface inanities of this novel, decried its endless preachments on the glories of war, and its pitiful founderings on repressed homosexual themes. But who, a year after reading the book, can remember the arguments for war — short of someone conscientiously collecting examples of human illogic? The arguments are inane; they do not relate to anything we know of war as a real interface of humanity with humanity: They do not stick in the mind. What remains with me, nearly ten years after my reading of the book, is the knowledge that I have experienced a world in which the placement of the information about the narrator’s face is proof that in such a world much of the race problem, at least, has dissolved. The book as text — as object in the hand and under the eye — became, for a moment, the symbol of that world. In that moment, sign, symbol, image, and rhetoric collapse into one, nonverbal experience, catapulted from somewhere beyond the textus (via the text) at the peculiarly powerful trajectory only sf can provide. But from here on, the description of what is unique to science fiction and how it works within the sf textus that is, itself, embedded in the whole language — and language-like — textus of our culture becomes a list of specific passages or sets of passages: better let the reader compile her or his own.