The obvious point must be made here: this explanation of the relation of these two onomal metonyms
Science/Fiction no more defines (or exhausts) the science-fictional-enterprise than our adolescent explanation of the relation of the two onomal 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.
And 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 can not be expressed, as the Red Squealer’s can, by a colon followed by a single infini-tive-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 explanation:
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 s-f 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 s-f 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 future-views-the-present forms one axis against which these stances may be plotted; the alien-views-the-familiar forms the other. 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 s-f 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 syntagmically 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 two hundred and fifty-odd pages (of a three-hun-dred-and-fifty-page book), is black. Others have argued the surface inanities of this novel, decried its endless preachments on the glories of war, and its pitiful founderings on sublimated 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 first 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 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 discourse collapse into one, nonverbal experience, catapulted from somewhere beyond the textus (via the text) at the peculiarly powerful trajectory only s-f can provide. But from here on, the description of what is unique to science fiction and how it works within the s-f 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.
I feel the science-fictional-enterprise is richer than the enterprise of mundane fiction. It is richer through its extended repertoire of sentences, its consequent greater range of possible incident, and through its more varied field of rhetorical and syntagmic organization. I feel it is richer in much the same way atonal music is richer than tonal, or abstract painting is richer than realistic. No, the apparant “simple-mindedness” of science fiction is not the same as that surface effect through which individual abstract paintings or particular atonal pieces frequently appear “impoverished” when compared to “conventional” works, on first exposure (exposed to, and compared by, those people who have absorbed only the “conventional” textus with which to “read” their art or music). This “impoverishment” is the necessary simplicity of sophistication, mete for the far wider web of possibilities such works can set resonating. Nevertheless, I think the “simple-mindedness” of science fiction may, in the end, have the same aesthetic weight as the “impoverishment” of modern art. Both are manifestations of “most works in the genre”—not the “best works.” Both, on repeated exposure to the best works, fall away—by the same process in which the best works charge the textus—the web of possibilities—with contour.
The web of possibilities is not simple—for either abstract painting, atonal music, or science fiction. It is the scatter pattern of elements from myriad individual forms, in all three, that gives their respective webs their densities, their slopes, their austerities, their charms, their contiguities, their conventions, their cliches, their tropes of great originality here, their crushing banalities there: the map through them can only be learned, as any other language is learned, by exposure to myriad utterances, simple and complex, from out the language of each. The contours of the web control the reader’s experience of any given s-f text; as the reading of a given s-f text recontours, however slightly, the web itself, that text is absorbed into the genre, judged, remembered, or forgotten.
In wonder, awe, and delight, the child who, on that evening, saw the juggernaut howl into the dark, named it “Red Squealer.” We know the name does not exhaust; it is only an entrance point into the textus in order to retrieve from it some text or other on the contours, formed and shaped of our experience of the entities named by, with, and organized around those ono-mal metonyms. The textus does not define; it is, however slightly, redefined with each new text embedded upon it, with each new text retrieved from it. We also know that the naming does not necessarily imply, in the child, an understanding of that textus which offers up its metonyms and in which those metonyms are embedded. The wonder, however, may initiate in the child that process which, resolved in the adult, reveals her, in helmet and rubber raincoat, clinging to the side-ladders, or hauling on the fore—or rear-steering wheel, as the Red Squealer rushes toward another blaze.