“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—s-f, speculative fiction, sci-fi, scientifiction—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[1] of associating an abtract 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 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 glass-faced pressure-meters and stainless-steel discharge-valves 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-resistence, 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 discourse—satisfying because of the functional nature of the adult episteme[2], which both generates the discourse and of which, once the discourse is uttered, the explanation (as it is absorbed into the memory, of both querant and explicator, which is where the textus lies embedded) becomes a part.
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 the 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. Molten 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 PyrE explosion. He was suffering from Synesthesia, 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 verbal emblems of scientific discourses—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 Gernsbach 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 s-f genre.
1
Metonymy is, of course, the rhetorical figure by which one thing is called with the name of another thing associated with it. The historian who writes, “At last, the crown was safe at Hampton,” is not concerned with the metallic tiarra but the monarch who, from time to time, wore it. The dispatcher who reports to the truck-boss, “Thirty drivers rolled in this weekend,” is basically communicating about the arrival of trucks those drivers drove and cargoes those trucks hauled. Metonymic is a slightly strained, adjectival construction to label such associational processes. Metonym is a wholly-coined, nominative one, shored by a wholly spurious (etymologically speaking) resemblance to “synonymy/synonym” and “antinomy/antinym.” Still, it avoids confusion. In a text practically opaque with precision, it distinguishes “metonymy”—the-thing-associated (“crown,” “driver”) from “metonymy”—the-process-of-association (crown to monarch; driver to cargo). The orthodox way of referring to both is with the single term.
2
The episteme is the structure of knowledge read from the epistomological