TIME: 30 min.
DISTANCE: 3.6 mi.
TOTAL: 33.3 mi.
NOTES: Next time, cut your nails before rowing.
SHIRE-RECKONING: OMG BLACK RIDER!!! AIEEEEE!!!

---

In fairness to Professor Rabkin, I need to tell you all that today's lecture on Frankenstein was not only entirely unobjectionable (that's higher praise than it looks like), but also offered a very clever observation about the relationship between Frankenstein and the Gothic, particularly the Gothic expliqué à la Anne Radcliffe.

The Gothic expliqué works by what we would call (as Rabkin points out) the Scooby Doo ending. There are all kinds of strange and apparently supernatural events, but at the end, they are all revealed to be natural. What Mary Shelley does, Rabkin says, is move the ENDING of the Gothic expliqué to the BEGINNING (although he fails to note both the meta--the explanation has become part of the apparatus of the text rather than a feature of the text itself--and the fact that this preface was written by P. B. rather than M. W. Shelley): "The event on which this fiction is founded, has been supposed, by Dr Darwin, and some of the physiological writers of Germany, as not of impossible occurrence." And thus we have the claim of plausibility against a background of science that Rabkin lists as one of the defining characteristics of science fiction.

And a claim of scientific plausibility is a characteristic of science fiction--not all science fiction, and to a greater or lesser extent, but it is there, and I like this observation about Radcliffe and Shelley partly because it makes that issue so very clear.

---

I should also note--I've been thinking about this--that probably the chief reason I am actively hostile to Professor Rabkin's ideas about fantasy (N.b., this is not the same as being hostile to Professor Rabkin himself.) is that he seems to want to elide from consideration the extensive canon of twentieth century fantastic literature in English that is neither (a.) science fiction nor (b.) for children. When he wants to talk about twentieth century fantasy, he either goes for children's literature (The Phantom Tollbooth) or South American magical realism and French post-modernism. And while I have no problem with discussing any of these genres, any more than I have a problem with an extensive discussion of nineteenth and twentieth century Anglophone science fiction, it really chafes my hide that he's ignoring H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, M. R. James, Russell Kirk, C. L. Moore, Robert E. Howard, Robert W. Chambers, Hope Mirlees, Oliver Onions, Robert Aickman, Algernon Blackwood, J. Sheridan Le Fanu, E. R. Eddison, Austin Tappan Wright, John Collier, Roald Dahl, Shirley Jackson, Lord Dunsany, Mervyn Peake . . . Bram Stoker is cited only to be dismissed, and even Tolkien is reduced to mere tokenism. (And none of the people I listed is part of the post-Tolkien commerical fantasy boom, which Rabkin does at least mention.)

Obviously, this is a choice on his part. Obviously, I disagree with it. Vehemently. And that being said, I'm going to let go of it, because there is no point in judging any intellectual endeavor on what it has chosen not to do.

TIME: 30 min.
DISTANCE: 3.5 mi.
TOTAL: 29.7 mi.
NOTES: Too busy yelling at Prof. Rabkin to go for the burn.
SHIRE-RECKONING: I can see the River from here!

---

We've started Part 2 of the lecture series and Professor Rabkin is defining science fiction. He constructs a definition of science fiction in which the prototype has three characterisitcs:

1. claim of plausibility against a background of science (he's also asserted that Star Wars is science fiction, and I'd really like to know where he finds the claim of plausibility in it*)
2. high adventure (at this point, I yelled "MIKE!" at the DVD player, because Growing Up Weightless is brilliant science fiction and not even remotely "high adventure"**)
3. intellectual excitement (I will grant that good science fiction does provide this, but you know, so do mysteries. Fantasy can do it, too--at least I hope to hell fantasy can do it, or what on earth have I been doing for the past fifteen years?)

There's also an implicit, unexamined definition of science fiction against fantasy, whereby science fiction is (a.) for adults and (b.) literature.

And I'm sorry. Taking cheap potshots at the MOVIE VERSION of Dracula (and he doesn't even specify which movie) to assert that Frankenstein is more scientific and more plausible, and he conflates the Karloff Frankenstein with the Shelley Frankenstein anyway, since Mary Shelley very carefully avoids ANY explanation of how Victor animates his creature--I think that was the point at which I descended into name-calling . . . no, sorry, that was when he was expressing ASTONISHMENT that Asimov and Tolkien should be grouped together by publishers. I very nearly stopped the CD at the point where he was explaining prototypical definitions with the example of female beauty. "We look at a woman," he says, and you know what? That "we" does not include any women in it. It's that nice unexamined "the generic pronoun in English is 'he'" kind of misogyny which has no animus against women, and it doesn't matter unless you ARE a woman, in which case you suddenly feel like you've been asked to leave.

Also, when he talked about the types of definition, citing Wittgenstein (prototypical, functional, characteristic, and social) he forgot to mention the other crucial axis, prescriptivist vs. descriptivist. But since he's chosen to make a prototypical definition, he's prescriptivist by default. Which means I will be severely skeptical from here on out.

Also, he's trying to claim The Tempest is science fiction. Where is the science? Where, for that matter, is the claim of plausibility? WHISKEY TANGO FOXTROT, OVER.

Um.

Well, you know, it got my heart rate up. *g*

---
*My Star Wars canon includes only three movies and does not contain the word "midichlorians" in its lexicon. And Rabkin's only talking about A New Hope anyway.

**Speaking of Mike, I hope he knew about and visited the Mid-Continent Railway Museum. We went last weekend, and I kept thinking, "Mike would love this!"

torrilin and pnh have taken me to task for, well, sloppy synechdoche and lousy genre theory.

It is the case that there is a corner of the vast and sprawling genre of science fiction that self-identifies as "hard sf" that does, in fact exhibit the characteristics I describe. It is not, however, the ONLY corner that self-identifies as "hard sf," nor (at this time) the most influential of those corners, nor should I have lumped them all cavalierly in together--nor implied that one of that constellation of characteristics inevitably and invariably brings the others along with it.

It is also the case that I, personally, have a somewhat uneasy relationship with hard sf--in the broad sense of science fiction which grounds itself in the hard sciences--due in part to my even more uneasy relationship with the hard sciences themselves. Personal unease and uncertainty lead (as ever) to overgeneralizations, and if I didn't want to unpack what I meant, I shouldn't have gotten in the ring.

("Illegitimate sf" is a piece of personal shorthand--invented here--and I shouldn't have used it without defining it, either.)

Sometimes nothing can save me from myself.

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents."
--H. P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu

---

Lovecraft is right, of course, the irony being that the correlation of seemingly unrelated ideas is how creativity works. Richard Hugo's The Triggering Town talks about this very helpfully in relation to poetry, as he describes the way a poem can be moved from its apparent subject to its real subject. And it's the thing that I found addictive about my college education: taking six different subjects at once resulted in some remarkable cross-pollinations.

It is also, of course, why fiction writers need to read nonfiction. Because we need those moments of brilliant cross-connect to generate stories.

It's also why elisem's Artist's Challenges work; the yoking of words to metal forces exactly the kind of cascade-effect I'm talking about.

It is a drug, make no mistake. And that's why Lovecraft is right.

---

I had one of those blinding cross-connects this morning, thanks to matociquala sending me the link to Ursula K. Le Guin's review of Jan Morris' Hav. (Which sounds like an awesomely cool book, and, yes, the review does leave me panting to find a copy.) Le Guin says:

This lack of plot and characters is common in the conventional Utopia, and I expect academics and other pigeonholers may stick Hav in with Thomas More and co. That is a respectable slot, but not where the book belongs. Probably Morris, certainly her publisher, will not thank me for saying that Hav is in fact science fiction, of a perfectly recognisable type and superb quality. The "sciences" or areas of expertise involved are social - ethnology, sociology, political science, and above all, history. ... Serious science fiction is a mode of realism, not of fantasy; and Hav is a splendid example of the uses of an alternate geography.

Whereas I, reading Le Guin's description of Hav--and noting her reference to her own Orsinian Tales--would describe it as fantasy.

But fantasy of a certain kind. And here's where the cross-connect happened, because yesterday, Bear and I were talking about the world-building in A Companion to Wolves (otherwise known as our wolf-smut book), and I fell over a distinction, like falling over a tree root, between "fantasy" and "hard fantasy." Which, as a back-formation from "hard science fiction," surely does look like a contradiction in terms, but bear with me for a minute.

Hard science fiction is science fiction grounded strongly in the "hard" sciences: physics, astronomy, chemistry, etc. It is also traditionally science fiction that has little or no interest in characterization or anything other than the Really Cool Shit (that being the technical term) its author has come up with. It is the science fiction that glorifies the sensawunda (sense of wonder) and believes this to be the genre's ultimate goal. It is also traditionally the preserve of male writers and readers, and the brouhaha starts up again periodically about whether women can or should be allowed to play with this particular set of tinker-toys.

You may suspect I am not in sympathy with hard sf; you would be right. However, my lack of sympathy is partly due to my own scientific ignoramity (I don't get a sensawunda charge off hard sf because I find the mental calisthenics distracting) and partly due to gender politics--not due to any feeling that wonder is out of bounds or childish or not worthwhile. In fact, my most recent encounter with a good sensawunda charge is The Lies of Locke Lamora, which I started yesterday. Wonder is not generated by science alone.

Hard fantasy, in my newly-minted definition, is fantasy that takes its world-building seriously, not as window-dressing or stage scenery, but as a necessary and important part of the story. And there are fantasies that do this, that are intent on working out the details, on having internal consistency of the slightly inconsistent kind that mirrors history most accurately, making their invented societies viable, making the imaginary world real and therefore, inevitably, a commentary on our own world.

... exactly what Le Guin says Morris is doing in Hav.

To-may-to, to-mah-to.

I've argued before that fantasy and science fiction have fundamental differences. Now I'm arguing that they don't. Or, rather, I'm arguing that while there are fantasies that have no truck with science fiction, and vice versa, there's also an area of convergence, where hard fantasy blends into illegitimate sf. Both of these are my own terms: fantasy that thinks about world-building in an sfnal way; sf that approaches its subject matter with a fantasist's sensibility.

Construct a theoretical model. Watch it spin. Take it down. Build another. Spin it around and see how it flies. Watch for the cross-connects that light up the internal landscape. I'm not saying this is how things are; I'm saying it's how they might be.

[This originated as a comment in coffeeandink's blog, responding to her citation of Mary Papke quoting David Ketterer talking about Pamela Zoline's "The Heat Death of the Universe":

David Ketterer, for instance, in his New Worlds for Old, insists that like the work of J.G. Ballard, Zoline's story merely borrows "a science-fictional conception only for its metaphoric appropriateness." While her description of one woman's ennui in relation to universal entropy is perhaps "apocalyptic in a psychedelic or surrealist sense," he argues, "because the reality is grounded in a housewife and her kitchen and because of the lack of plausible scientific rationale connecting the end of the material universe with her state, Zoline's piece cannot legitimately be classified as science fiction."

And I realized that I feel strongly enough about both Ketterer's use of the word "legitimate" and my response to it to want to stick my comment over here where I can find it again.]

Can we take that word "legitimate" out behind the chemical sheds and shoot it, please?

Because it implies that somebody somewhere has the authority to validate a story. YES, you are sfnal. Three cheers! Here is your propeller beanie. NO, you are not sfnal. Go directly to Jail. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.

And, no. It doesn't work like that. The story is a story that works, or a story that doesn't work. Genres are not members-only clubs, and it doesn't actually say anything useful about either genre or story to get into niggling technical debates about whether it's a "legitimate" member of the club or not. The story may work/not work due in part to its relationship to a multiplicity of genres, and it may work/not work for a particular reader based on her relationship to a multiplicity of genres. But it will not be a better story for having the word LEGITIMATE stamped on its forehead.

And if you're not writing "legitimate sf," what are you writing? Illegitimate sf?

Actually, I'm quite sure that's what I'm writing. But that doesn't mean I'm not writing sf.