Okay. Hello, everyone. So this lecture is called What is SF? Some thoughts on genre. The title is a
question and my focus really is on the importance of questions in respect to genre. Why do we even
worry about it? And I'm going to start simply with the question, with the question, what is
SF? In a very simple-minded way, what do those letters SF stand for? This is a multiple choice
test, science fiction. Do they stand for speculative fiction? Do they stand for sci-fi? Do they, whoa,
we missed a, there should be an all of the above there. Do they stand for all of the above? You
should all be standing up and saying yes, they stand for all of the above. The term SF or this
abbreviation SF has become widely current in the field because it's convenient for people to be
able to say SF without having to worry about whether or not they're actually talking about science
fiction or speculative fiction and so on. Because there are important differences between them. In
the general field of this kind of fiction, whatever we call it, the most commonly used term is
science fiction, but these other terms have particular importance and particular relevance to
certain moments in the history of the genre, certain media, certain audiences. The term science
fiction, for example, comes from the pulp magazine milieu from the late 1920s, early 1930s. That's
where it came into common usage. The pulp magazines were magazines that were devoted entirely to one
or another kind of fiction. There were pulps devoted to spy fiction, detective fiction, westerns and
so on. Science fiction grew, the term emerged in that milieu to designate magazines that published
this kind of fiction. Through the 1940s and 1950s, that was the dominant market, the dominant mode for
the publication of this kind of fiction. In the 50s and the 60s, paperback novels kind of took over
that dominant market space in print. And the term science fiction transferred over to the paperback
novel. If you go to a bookstore, look for books in an English bookstore, English language bookstore of
this type, you will find the term science fiction on the back cover. But the term speculative fiction
emerged in the 1960s precisely as an attempt to distance some writing and some publications from the
commercial conventionalized formulaic associations that had accrued around the term science fiction.
Speculative fiction was supposed to be more literary. It was supposed to have different aesthetic and
political ambitions than science fiction was. The term sci-fi took off from science fiction somewhat in
the opposite direction. It refers mainly to media like television and film. It came up in relationship to
the 1950s era B movies or monster science fiction movies. It would be the term that would be used for
Star Wars and the Star Trek franchises. So each one of them has a different audience, a different medium,
to a certain extent, different ambitions connected to it. And there have been many other terms over the
history of the genre that have been associated with, that have been used instead of science fiction. The
romance, the scientific novel that Jules Verne used for publications like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,
Around the World in 80 Days, Journey to the Center of the Earth in the 1860s, 70s, 1880s. In the 1890s when
she well published The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, other classic examples of what we now call
science fiction, he called them scientific romance. And that was a term that was not his peculiar idiosyncratic
invention but was widely shared. The term that was first applied to this kind of magazine in the pulp
of 1920s is this strange word, scientific fiction. The inventor of that term was a man named Hugo Gernsback
who was also the editor of Amazing Stories, the first magazine devoted entirely to this kind of fiction.
And this cover from an April 1928 edition of Amazing Stories, you can see Hugo Gernsback editor under the
title and you can see science of fiction. That's his market niche that he's trying to carve out. And in
association with this welter of different terms, there's a corresponding welter of different definitions of
science fiction. Here's an example of some editors' definitions. In the 1920s, Hugo Gernsback, the editor of
Amazing Stories, trying to define the kind of fiction he wanted to sell, said, by science of fiction, I mean
the Jules Verne, H.G. Wells and Edgar Allan Poe type of story, a charming romance intermingled with scientific
fact and prophetic vision. In the 1940s, John W. Campbell was the most powerful and influential editor of a
science fiction magazine and he's the one who's most associated with what some science fiction scholars and
fans call the golden age of science fiction, meaning the 1940s and the early 1950s, said this, scientific
methodology involves the proposition that a well constructed theory will not only explain away known phenomena, but
will also predict new and still undiscovered phenomena. Science fiction tries to do much the same and write up in
story form what the results look like when applied not only to machines, but to human society as well. And then
in the 1960s, Judith Merrill, who is an influential editor in what's called the New Wave, that was an attempt to
break away from the commercial genre ghetto, as it was called, of science fiction and to introduce higher aesthetic
and more critical political aims into science fiction and very much also to open up science fiction in terms of gender
from its boys only kind of orientation under Campbell, wrote this speculative fiction. She's using that term instead of
science fiction. Stories whose objective is to explore, to discover, to learn by means of projection,
extrapolation, analog, hypothesis and paper experimentation, something about the nature of the universe of man or reality.
These are only a few of the definitions that have been made. There are many. It would be easy for me to add dozens and kind of
spend the entire time reading different definitions of the genre. The question really is, why are there so many of these
definitions? What makes them proliferate in this way? The essay that Lars Schmink asked you to read for today, the essay,
The Red Sun is High, The Blue Low by Kathleen Spencer, says the question, what is science fiction is probably the wrong
question. We should really ask, how do readers identify science fiction? But I think there's actually a question that comes
before that. Before we ask how readers identify a particular genre, maybe we should start out by asking, what is a genre? What is this
phenomenon genre? And what is a particular genre? What are its characteristics? So here are a couple of very general
definitions of genre. You'll notice that these two definitions have to do with genre as an aspect of everyday
communication, something that's inescapable, something that we're using all the time, whether we know it or not. Nothing to do with conscious
intentions most of the time. So John Frowell in a book called Simply Genre defines genre as a set of highly organized
constraints on the production and interpretation of meaning. And Shvetan Todorov defines it in his book, Genres and Discourse.
This way, in a given society, the recurrence of certain discursive properties is institutionalized and individual texts are
produced and perceived in relation to the norm constituted by that codification. A genre, whether literary or not, is nothing
other than that codification of discursive properties. Now, they're talking about something that happens all the time and that we do
all the time. And just to illustrate that, think about any time in your life when you've been misunderstood because you thought you
were telling a joke, but somebody didn't understand it and took it as something else, or you thought you were making a suggestion when
someone took it as a command or a criticism. These are examples of genre miscommunication, of the intended genre and the
heard genre being two different things. So genre is a ubiquitous and important phenomenon in everyday life. Now, we're really
worried about its literary application. We're worried about genres of fiction. We're worried about kinds of stories, storytelling. So let's
look at some definitions of literary genres and see what they look for. Right here, the Wikipedia. We can always go to the Wikipedia, right,
for anything. A literary genre is a category of literary composition. That is probably the most bland and noncommittal definition possible.
But then it goes on. Genres may be determined by literary technique, tone, content, or even, as in the case of fiction, length. A novel is a
long story. A short story is shorter, okay? The literary scholars and critics, Renee Wellick and Austin Warren, have this to say.
The theory of genres is a principle of order. It classifies literature and literary history, not by time or place, period, or national language, but by
specifically literary types of organization or structure. So they would say, when you're looking at genre, you're not looking at 19th century German
literature, but rather at the lyric or the novel or drama. So it's not place or time bound, but it doesn't matter if it was written in ancient Greece or in
New York yesterday, it's still a tragedy or a comedy, okay? So what are they looking for? They're looking for shared features, conventions and types of
organization and structures. A couple other genre theorists expand the scope of that sense of genre a bit. Jonathan Culler writes that genre is a conventional
function of language, a particular relation to the world which serves as a norm or expectation to guide the reader in his or her encounter with the text.
So this is more than just shared conventions, norms, expectations in relation to the world. It's a little more functionally ambitious definition.
Jean Frau writes, I understand genre to be a historically specific pattern of organization of semiotic material. Semiotic material just means signifying signs, okay?
Along a number of dimensions in a specific medium and in relation to particular types of situational constraints which help shape this pattern. Genre in turn acts as a
constraint upon that is a structuring and shaping of meaning and value at the level of text where certain strategic ends, whatever they might be. It produces effects of truth and
authority that are specific to it and projects a world that is generically specific. Frau talks about the world of the headline, the world of the curse, the world of situation
comedy. Each one of these genres projects a certain kind of world that is understood to be the setting that the genre assumes. So what do we look for according to these
definitions? We look for norms, we look for expectations, and we look for these generic worlds. Okay, so now if we are going to ask what are the norms, the expectations, the
generic worlds, the shared conventions, the types of organization and structure that pertain to science fiction, we can look for a formal definition of this genre, science fiction or SF.
And by far the most influential definition ever advanced and certainly formally the best one is the definition given by Darko Suven in the early 1970s in his book Metamorphoses of Science Fiction in 1979.
He called science fiction a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition on his main formal device is an imaginative framework
alternative to the author's empirical environment. That's kind of a mouthful, isn't it? But what he means is estranged. It has to be estranged, which means that it has to be otherworldly or in the future
or there has to be some large scale strategic difference between the world that it takes place in and the real world. But it's also that estrangement interacts with cognition, he says, which means that it has to be rigorously logical
and self consistent. It's often said that it has to be inconsistent with what's known of natural law or with the findings of science and so forth, although those rules are not quite so strict as they might seem.
So now I think we can actually go back to Spencer's question, how do readers identify a text as SF? How do they identify the interaction of estrangement and cognition within an imaginative framework alternative to the author's empirical environment, we could say.
Well, Spencer actually approaches science fiction as a species of realism, so she starts from what's called the effect of the real. In a realist text, there are objects that we call the meaningless details in the sense that they're not symbolic, they're not metaphors of something, they're not meant to be foils to character or anything like that, they're just there.
Their theirness is what's important about them, the breeze, the sunshine, the dust, the doors, the chairs, the grass, things that you just take for granted as part of this world, but that are supplied to you to make you feel that you are in this world.
These meaningless details in the science fiction text, however, take on a very, very different valence because although they're still meaningless in the sense that they're not metaphors or symbols of anything, they also call attention to themselves in the sense that they're very odd, they're estranged, they are parts of an imaginary world, not the world that you normally live in.
So the example that Kathleen Spencer gives, a very famous one, is a moment when somebody walks through a door in a story by Robert A. Heinlein, and the sentence says the door iris, implying that doors in this world open the way camera shutters open.
And no one in the story says, wow, what a weird door or anything like that, they just walk through it because it's simply the way doors are in this world.
So you have an imaginary world, but you have an imaginary world that's realistic for the people in it and is narrated to you as if you were also a part of this world.
You were a member of this imaginary audience for whom all these odd neologisms, strange aspects of, say, whatever it is, outer space or future setting were simply to be taken for granted.
It's an imaginary world for an imaginary audience that's narrated in a completely realistic fashion. This is a really interesting and very perceptive analysis of the way science fiction works.
So there are advantages and disadvantages to what Spencer does here. First of all, she does explain very well how science fiction is related to and different from literary realism.
She also alerts us to this kind of generic contract. What is it as a reader of science fiction that you expect when you pick up a science fiction text?
You expect to be challenged to adjust yourself to this imaginary world, to figure it out without being told to blatantly what is different, what has happened in the 100 years of the future that separate your world from its world.
For instance, why are these strange words like the door irising appearing? That's one of the aesthetic pleasures of science fiction and is part of the generic contract.
Obviously, it helps you to understand how to read science fiction as science fiction. But what about the disadvantages, the drawbacks?
Well, first of all, it's entirely focused on prose fiction and science fiction is a genre that has very important film and television aspects as well as before that the theater.
It was quite important on the stage before it became a television and a film genre.
It's not clear that Spencer's analysis of the way we cogitate over sentences really is adequate for the way it works in film.
Second of all, and this is really a little more serious problem, part of the same problem is that it ignores the real diversity of science fiction.
It identifies a certain kind of science fiction text and a certain kind of reader as that's it, that's science fiction, that's what it really is.
But there are certainly kinds of science fiction in readers that don't really challenge themselves in quite the same way, yet they're still called science fiction.
So there is a broader category that it's somehow slicing a portion out of. And most seriously, that's a problem about the history.
It's one thing to say that maybe a modern space opera comic book doesn't operate this way. But it's quite another thing to say that, well, none of Jules Verne's work really operates this way, nor does H.G. Wells' work operate this way.
This is a kind of writing that she's identifying that really can be identified as coming out of the 1930s magazine milieu and gaining ascendancy in the 1940s and the 1950s, primarily under the editorship of John W. Campbell at Astounded Stories.
And why did it emerge then, only then? Why wasn't this kind of story being written before then? Did people just not think of it?
There's a real gap between the formal precision of this particular definition of science fiction and the historical scope of the phenomenon that we're talking about.
So I want to talk about that gap between the formal definition and the historical reality, let's say, or the historical phenomenon.
And I want to get at it, first of all, by contrasting two different kinds of definition. When you ask, you know, what is a certain thing, there are really two quite different ways of answering that sort of question.
So take, for example, this question, what is a Christian? There are two really different ways to answer that question. One would be to say, a Christian is a man or a woman who walks in the light of Christ, someone who has learned the lessons of the beatitudes and is humble and meek, someone who turns the other cheek, someone who believes that charity is the primary virtue.
But there's quite a different way to answer the question, which is to say, a Christian is somebody who goes to a Christian church. A Christian is someone who was born of Christian parents and baptized.
A Christian is somebody who marks the Christian box on the survey for the census. This is a very different but no less accurate definition.
The first, the prescriptive definition says, a Christian is someone who lives up to a certain ideal, who fulfills a certain set of requirements that are fairly rigorous.
The second one is merely descriptive and says, well, it's all those people. That's what we mean when we say, a Christian is somebody who goes to that church. They may not believe in God. They may be, you know, good or bad or indifferent people.
We don't care. They're Christians because they go to the church on Sunday or because they check that box in the census.
Well, if we go to science fiction, that's exactly the difference that we get between the formal definition and the historical approach. So the definition that Darko Suven has supplied us is very definitely a prescriptive definition.
You have to be a pretty rigorous writer to fulfill his condition. You have to have the interaction of estrangement and cognition. You have to be rigorously self-consistent, okay, in order to be writing science fiction according to him.
And actually he's quite clear about this. He says 90% or 95% of the stuff that people call science fiction just as something else, something less interesting than this.
And here's what a kind of graphic representation of this kind of science fiction might look at or this kind of view of science fiction might look like.
These are taken from Darko Suven's book, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, and he's trying to explain the difference between science fiction and other similar or dissimilar genres, and particularly the difference between science fiction and fantasy.
That's really the focus of this particular strategy that he uses. And if you look on the left hand side, it's quite clearly a prescriptive and hierarchical difference in the estranged options.
These are binary oppositions, logical choices that are set, static. You can either be naturalistic or you can be estranged. And once you've made that choice, you can either be cognitive or non-cognitive.
Well, how can it possibly be better to be non-cognitive than to be cognitive? It's clearly a hierarchical choice. So if you're cognitive, you're writing science fiction. If you're not, you're doing myth, you're doing folktale, you're doing fantasy.
And you can tell that it's hierarchical by looking at the other side. If you're cognitive and naturalistic, you're writing realism, the dominant fictional mode of the 19th and 20th centuries.
If you're not, you're writing sub-literature, something less than literature. The same things can be said about the chart on the bottom. It's certainly better to be pluridimensional or multidimensional than to be one-dimensional, which is what you are if you're doing either the sub-literature of realism or myth, folktale, or fantasy.
Now, the descriptive historical view is messier. There's a lot more than four options. There's not these neat binary oppositions, but rather all kinds of different people making all kinds of different choices and all kinds of different circumstances for all kinds of different reasons.
And it's a kind of a mess, and it's hard to sort out. In fact, a graphic representation of it might look a little bit more like this. This is a wonderful picture. I really like it a lot.
It's a history of science fiction map by a guy named Ward Shelley, and I've given you the web address. I encourage you all to go to that website and look at this, and it's marvelous and overwhelming detail.
But what does it look like? It looks like a whale with a kind of octopus legs coming out the other end or something like that. It is chronological. It starts where those tentacles end.
And it goes down to the present in this big blobular movement forward. At the present, you notice that it has little tentacles or streams that flow completely out of the chart. So science fiction is not cut off in this kind of prescriptive manner from other genres, but actually connected to them.
Well, let me show you this wonderful map in a little bit more detail.
Here's where the origins of science fiction, according to Ward Shelley's map, are these ambivalent emotions, fear and wonder, two aspects of the same thing really related to the exploration and observation, philosophy and art.
Those are the six tentacles that work their way down into the rest. And you can see legend on the one side coming down from wonder, animism on the other side coming down from fear, religious and fictional roots or tendencies working together.
Similarly, exploration technology, the grand mythological epic traditions associated with Dante and the philosophical traditions associated with Plato's Republic, which work their way down to utopianism in the bottom part of this wonderful chart.
And you see all these things work their way down to this big explosion or stomach or whatever it is, that red cloud there called the Enlightenment. And out of the Enlightenment comes science and out of science, science adventure and fantasy adventure over on the side.
And you see Jules Verne in this wonderful balloon traveling around the world in 80 days. But also out of the Enlightenment comes this big green cloud, the Counter-Enlightenment, the Romantic Movement, Storm and Drum, the anti-rational literature that leads to the Gothic novel and to Edgar Allan Poe.
So there we have, you know, the Jules Verne, Edgar Allan Poe, H.G. Wells type of story that Hugo Gernsback was talking about emerging out of two quite different moments or strands of influence or streams of development from the Enlightenment.
And you see as the Gothic novel Edgar Allan Poe stream develops out of it comes this green stream that is called Modern Horror. So there's not some kind of strict logical divide between the different genres, science fiction and horror, but rather a historical entanglement of the genres with one another.
The red stream that rises up out of the Counter-Enlightenment there goes to the pulp magazines and paperback novels right into Hugo Gernsback and John W. Campbell.
But it's not as though that's separated from more logically unconnected to all of these other streams that are around it.
So it's really a wonderfully complicated and tangled pluralistic approach to what's going on.
And this tangled map, it's produced the most, the thing that I really want to say about it is this, that it's produced by a lot of different people with a lot of different projects acting for a lot of different reasons.
And the little epigrammatic kernel of wisdom I want to draw out of that is that genre is an act, not a fact. That genre is not something that's just there, it's something that people do.
And people do it in all kinds of different ways for all kinds of different reasons. And because of that, it's not static. It's not a permanent set of logical choices that simply sits there and asks you to check one box cognitive and a strange versus the other three.
But rather something that's ever shifting, ever changing in its shape, that's amorphous and entangled and complicated if you approach it historically.
So here we have a couple, and this is what more recent theorists of genre have been emphasizing more and more. So Rick Altman in his book Film Genre writes that genres are not in their categories shared by all, but discursive claims made by real speakers for particular purposes
in specific situations. And Mark Bold and Cheryl Vint in a provocative article called There is No Such Thing as Science Fiction.
I write this, that genres are never as they are frequently perceived to be objects which already exist in the world and which are subsequently studied by genre critics.
But rather they are fluid and tenuous constructions made by the interaction of various claims and practices by writers, producers, distributors, marketers, readers, fans, critics, and other discursive agents.
Another implication of this approach to genre is that you can't actually tell the genre of a piece simply by enumerating its formal properties because
the reader may have a different set of, different readers may have different sets of formal properties in mind and the same text can be read in different ways.
Jean Frau writes, genre is not a property of a text, but is a function of reading. Genre is a category that we impute to text.
This is very much in line with what Kathleen Spencer is saying, of course. It's neither a property, but she really implies that it's a property of sentences and writing.
But he would say it's not a property of and located in the text nor is a projection of and located in the readers. It exists as a part of the relationship between texts and readers and it has a systemic existence.
So there's a shared convention with a social force. And I want to really think about this now. What does this mean to say that genres have a systemic existence?
And I'm going to get at it by asking a question. The famous play by Sophocles that is the prime example of tragedy in the Aristotle's great treatise, the poetics, Oedipus the king.
Is it a tragedy or is it in fact unknown to Aristotle and Sophocles actually a detective story? You do have a criminal, you do have a crime, you do have a central figure who's kind of a public puzzle solver who
systematically investigates the crime, discovers the criminal, the criminal receives punishment, justice is done. Oh, that sounds a lot like a detective story.
And you could say, well, it's clearly it's not, say, a science fiction. It doesn't do anything science fiction does. It's not a Western. It's clearly a detective story if those are the alternatives that we're looking at.
But the point of this story is that none of that makes any difference at all if you're wondering whether it's tragedy, comedy, satire, lyric or an epic, the genre system that Sophocles and Aristotle shared.
These are systemic differences. And one of the notable things about systemic differences is that details that may be meaningful within one system of meaning, of communication may be totally meaningless in another.
In linguistics, this is a well-known fact that there are certain, for instance, phonetic sounds that are meaningful in one language and not in another.
When, as an English speaker, you learn or I learned to speak Italian, I was constantly embarrassed by the fact that in Italian, double consonants make a real difference.
Whereas in English, double consonants are totally meaningless. Whether you say little or little, it's a different way to pronounce the same words.
And nobody would notice, really, the difference. But in Italian, if you say the word avocato, which has a double V, meaning your lawyer, it's very important to pronounce that WV or you've just called your lawyer an avocado.
A fleshy green fruit. And that's kind of embarrassing. So these details that are meaningless in one system that become meaningless in another distinguish between whether or not you're going to call Oedipus the King a detective story or a tragedy versus a comedy.
Because you can have a problem solver who published, ferrets out a criminal and punishes him in a comedy or a satire just as well as you can have it in a tragedy.
It's not a significant difference in that system. The implications that John Froud draws from this systemic nature of genre construction, the fact that there are different languages of genre, are these.
Text don't belong to genres, they use them. A text can be a member or identified as belonging to different genres depending on what genre system the reader is using.
They exist as relations between texts, not as properties of the text in isolation. There's no genre except in relationship. Almost every text uses multiple genres.
There's not any story that you could find that uses simply one genre. They always mix genres. Genres are always mixed together and it's almost a necessary facet of storytelling.
Anything longer than a headline or so has to mix genres. And that activates what Froud calls an economy of genres within itself and in relation to other texts.
And I want to talk now for the last few minutes of this lecture about this notion of the economy of genres and the systematicity of genres and the kinds of relationships among genres and within genres that it sets up.
What does it mean to talk about an economy of genres? It means that there are different choices that you can make and those choices have different values attached to them.
And when you make a choice, you take a position in relationship to other people who have made the same choice or different choices, that these choices have systematic consequences.
And the best person I know of for thinking about this kind of thing is the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who has a theory of the field of cultural production that was not set up to think about the economy of genres but works very well for it.
So according to Bourdieu, when you make certain kinds of social choices like what movie to go to or what book to read, there are two axes that you can map that choice on.
One is, he uses it as a vertical axis in his graphs of this, symbolic capital. By symbolic capital, Bourdieu means status. He means prestige.
Certainly, certain kinds of occupations carry high status like CEOs of banks or university professors. They're supposed to have some kind of respect because of the amount of education or whatever that it takes to attain that.
Whereas other kinds of occupations or nonoccupations have very low status.
On the horizontal axis, Bourdieu maps economic capital. So you can have high symbolic capital, but low economic capital, like a university professor.
Or you can have high symbolic capital and high economic capital, like the CEO of a large corporation. Or you can have high economic capital and low symbolic capital, like for instance, a Disney film.
Okay, so this is the way the field of production looks, and I'm sorry that the typist is small on this. This is the way it looks, the way Bourdieu sets it up.
Symbolic capital, high degree of prestige, what he calls consecration or institutional consecration at the top of the chart, low symbolic capital, low degree of consecration at the bottom.
Low economic capital, poor at the left, high economic capital, rich at the right. And there's a science fiction critic named Andrew Milner, recently adapted this scheme of Bourdieu's to science fiction.
So this chart, this kind of weirdly over elaborated chart here, is one that he has ripped off from an article by Pierre Bourdieu on French 19th century fiction and simply transposed science fiction names and personages and subgenres onto it.
So if you want to understand how this chart looks, you can look at, for instance, the middle of the chart that goes from high degree of consecration, old stuff at the top, to low degrees of consecration, new stuff at the bottom.
And you see what's down at the bottom? Graphic novels by people like Alan Moore. Just above that, pulp fiction, pulp magazine fiction, Hugo Gernsback and John W. Campbell are the names he gives.
Just above that, the genre SF novel and short story by figures like Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. Above that, a little bit cyberpunk, he puts his opinion.
But speculative fiction, you see, is quite a bit higher up towards the high degree of consecration. And at the top, what he calls the literary science fiction novel, something like George Orwell's 1984, a novel that's often not considered science fiction at all.
And there's a reason for that, that I want to get to right here, which is that this is my addition or my comment upon this kind of chart, is that the difference between these two genre systems we were talking about earlier in relation to Oedipus the King can be thought of in relationship to this chart.
That if you are thinking whether or not something's a tragedy or a comedy or a satire, you're using this old, highly consecrated genre system that's associated with the institutions and with the intellectual activity over several millennia.
Whereas if you're using the modern mass genre system, is this horror or is it a detective fiction or a combination or what? You are actually using a quite new genre system, comparatively speaking, one that's only around 100 years old or a little bit older.
And that pulls the given text down towards the bottom of the chart. If you talk about a novel as science fiction, it tends to pull it down towards the bottom of the chart.
So 1984, a literary science fiction novel will often be approached as satire, not as science fiction because satire pulls it up towards the top of the chart towards this classical genre system and this is an ongoing tension in a lot of genre discussion.
You could say about Darker Suven's whole enterprise that what he's trying to do, I don't think consciously, but more or less consciously really, that what he's trying to do is to take the term science fiction away from the bottom of the chart and put it up at the top of the chart.
And in the course of doing that, he has to leave, in his opinion, 95% of what it designates at the bottom of the chart and pull the worthy 5% up under the title literature of cognitive estrangement.
Another way to think about this chart that I think is very important and helpful is that it charts out communities of practice.
When you make a choice about what kind of genre approach you're using, when we talk about all the different actors who activate all the different senses of genres, we're not really talking about individuals, but about communities.
People who find this designation in common with one another and their commonality helps to reinforce their community with one another and generally this chart, which I want to emphasize is not a set of logically ordained static possibilities, but rather a set of ever shifting social relationships.
You can see that you can map onto this chart these five general areas of communities of practice. If you have low money and high prestige, you're probably in the community of practice of the intellectuals, the avant-garde artists, the critics, the university educated, but not economically, not economically highly successful people.
On the right-hand side on top of the chart is institutional consecration. This is where you get big institutions like art museums, for instance, where you have a lot of money and a lot of prestige. At the bottom right-hand part, the university itself actually belongs up on the right-hand corner of that chart.
Down at the bottom, you get the mass market. This is where Star Wars, where a lot of big money is, just as big or bigger than on the top right-hand side, but not a lot of symbolic capital. Something like the Star Wars or Star Trek franchises or Walt Disney films, Hollywood blockbusters of all sorts of types belong down there.
At the lower left-hand side, what do you have when you're talking about small audiences with low symbolic prestige? That's the definition of a cult, a cult film. When a cult film starts to gather more followers, when people outside the cult start watching and understanding it, it stops being a cult film.
It moves either towards the middle of the chart, the popular area, or if it's really highly successful, towards the right-hand side of the chart, towards the mass market.
In conclusion, what do I want to say? I want to say that there are a lot of different ways to approach a genre like science fiction. There are many different definitions, but there have to be many different definitions to accommodate all the different people who have a lot of different projects.
Some commercial, some artistic, some political, some intellectual, that want to use the genre and want to share the genre.
The questions that we should ask about SF or about what is SF don't necessarily have to do simply with those formal properties of texts that are designated as SF, but rather they have a lot to do with the actors and the agencies who are using this genre definition.
Here's my final list of questions about SF. The question of what is SF should lead us to the question, who cares? Because people do care. They care enough to argue about it. They care enough to designate it, to get upset when people contest that definition.
So we have to ask, why do they care? What difference does it make and to whom does it make a difference? These are questions that I think you should never let disappear from your approach to the question of what is SF.
And that's what I have to say. Thank you all very much for your attention.