No More Tomorrows:
The Criticism of Science Fiction as Science Fiction

Can you write the criticism of science fiction as if it were science fiction? And if you could, is there any point?

Arguably, the recursive science fiction (sf) of Barry Malzberg is the criticism of science as science fiction. Even the prolific Robert Silverberg produced bleak and magnificent examples of such, notably ‘The Science Fiction Hall of Fame’ (1973), and ‘Schwartz Between the Galaxies’ (1974).

What I have in mind is something subtly different. Rather than Malzberg’s nightmarish conflation of genre and criticism, I intend to develop a true critique of sf along with a false one that may or may not assist in establishing the truth of this (fictional) critique! Consider, for instance, a work like John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar, but now transformed to be made up of only the ‘Context’ and ‘The Happening World’ sections of the text. Transformed into a quantitatively slighter work, though qualitatively punchier and more patently avant-garde, perhaps entitled On Zanzibar.

Perhaps Steve Aylett’s Lint (2005) is closer to what I intend to produce, though mine will be somewhat more serious in its fictional execution. Stanisław Lem’s A Perfect Vacuum (1971) is possibly a better fit.

In what follows I envisage that we have managed to get scholarly papers from the future or from another planet. Fragments of such documents already litter speculative fiction. But what I have in mind is something perhaps both more ambitious and mundane–certainly at risk of being more boring. If we accept explicitly the dubious conclusion of the postmodernists who count all thought and production as types of fiction and fable–to be read or not as the case may be–we end by distrusting all accounts equally, which is its own type of clever stupidity. Caught in an unnecessarily labyrinthine and inescapably tautological way of thought. Nonetheless, postmodernism in its own proper arena, that of the liberated sign, can perhaps contribute to the fables of this dying social order, of global capital coughing up some more barbs and undigested clumps of criticism and critique. Postmodernism thought of generously as an occasionally brilliant superfluity, a baroque bauble at best. Am I too generous? Unquestionably.  

I won’t pretend there is no critique in this piece, or that critique is a phantasm, a question of mere perspective, or that this fiction is a sort of post fiction, post critique. No siree Bob. There is critique in this fiction, just as there is fiction in this critique. In all seriousness, you will find elements of my critique of sf in what follows, alongside of and less likely inextricably bound up with or weighed down by the fictions. And the critique, critique, critique…

I began by using a paragraph from Roger Luckhurst’s postmodern inflected ‘The Many Deaths of Science Fiction’ (1994) as inspiration. Cutting and pasting this paragraph into a document the transformation commenced. I added elements of my own peculiar critique of sf along with more obviously science fictional elements. The situationist concept and practice of détournement has informed this creation. It is also known by me alone as criticism by infodump.

Luckhurst’s essay title ironically evokes hard-boiled noir. A piece of theory masquerading as fiction—or simply is fiction? Something never definitively established in self-consciously postmodern works, in which a maddening ambivalence is often cover for something more mundane or simple minded.

I have often wondered if something that we might recognise as sf had already been posed under other skies, upon other brows, by way of the imaginable unimaginable of alien grunt or psionic blast, or any other assorted dialect unspoken and now forgot, obliterated more completely than if a planet itself and all that it held and supported fell into the ravenous photosphere of a dying star. Or of the sf to come, when the Earth itself has become this fiery hell, and the human race is no longer even a second-hand memory.

We are amongst it now, friends! Truth and fiction hopelessly confused and mixed, a melange of facts outrageous and otherwise. In any case, we have need of a similar appellation as that of Luckhurst’s essay for a piece of critical fiction—or is that, rather, fictional criticism? Thus, I want to turn to a citation from Goberg Tilsane’s suggestive essay, ‘No More Tomorrows: Science fiction, 1888-2079 C.E.’ (272 A.E.):

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Somewhere in this far-flung cosmos a way of life is dying; but then lifeways and people have always been dying, dying from the very moment they sketched out a history and genealogy. In this universe birth and death are transposable. Or, as the Terran philosopher Hegel once noted, the hour of our birth is the hour of our death. This helps us explain some of the strange similarities that Rryglecknik of Sytrios and Hugo Gernsback of planet Earth have, across the vast and uneven commons of space time.

Just as Gernsback produced science fiction (sf) as both a ghetto and an aspiration to be the whole world, Rryglecknik’s three laws of the Sytrion “Literary fantastic” (Lf, from Pre-Contact D’l’ax’kr’y, “poqech ozhkedjg” [Ang.]) remained an important reference along the genre’s tightly patrolled borders in the Late D’l’ax’n Era of old Sytrios. And yet both also foresaw the death of their respective creations, though radically opposed. Gernsback imagined a time when the entire world would be sf, and so sf would no longer be needed. His conception of sf was as propaedeutic, both entrée and preparation for the technologically advanced future. Rryglecknik’s was more pessimistic than this, using Lf as a platform for staging its inevitable end, though as a story akin to the most far flung of star epics whether from the early days of Sytrion Lf or Terran sf (yet another striking commonality between these distinct cultural forms).

The Terran pulps spawned an early Golden Age in the two decades after the genre was definitively named. So too the classics of the Sytrion Lf can be found in the four decades after Grychnax, Prolipss and Rryglecknik formed the “Eggs of the After-Now Circle” in the wake of the publication of Rryglecknik’s Song of a Wandering Star (1346 D.E.E). This remarkable similarity lies at the heart of the more recent discovery, post festum, inevitably, of their structural affinities. Nonetheless, the differences remain considerable.

The implosion of sf a mere forty odd years after its official birth under the name of the New Wave in sf is in part a fulfillment of Gernsback’s prophecy, though perhaps not exactly as Gernsback imagined. The aspiration to take sf into the “mainstream” or “relevance” or “reality” or even “post-reality”, is a supersession of sorts, a realisation and abolition of sf. Nonetheless, sf lived on for little over a century after this early and oft proclaimed death in the 1960s.

Sytrion Lf follows a somewhat more perplexing trajectory, in comparison, dying and being reborn over and over in an increasingly violent and chaotic fashion, that exceeded that of Terran sf’s bust-up of the 1970s. Neo Lf and Post-Neo Lf certainly share a certain structural affinity with the Terran New Wave in sf of the 1960s and 70s. But their appearance in the wake of two seemingly definitive ends to Lf that happened over the long Wars of Resemblance in the Late D’l’ax’n Era was no mere coincidence, even when it was. This tumultuous period explains in part the stop-start appearance of the successive versions of Lf, just as the so-called “premature end” of the D’l’ax’n Era further explains the definitive end of Lf.

Today, the utter collapse and final death of sf itself in the late 21st century of the so-called Christian Era seems obvious from our perspective. Our most perspicacious critics have even controversially identified this finale in the early years of the genre. So we find it hard to believe that the human producers and consumers of what we now call the “afterlife” of sf, c. 1975-2079, could believe that sf, once “discovered”, would never be lost or destroyed. Such an end was better understood retrospectively, in the years immediately after 2079 C.E. when the last Hugo was awarded.

What now, now that the modern, postmodern, pseudomodern, and the neopseudomodern have all died their (super)natural deaths? Here the words of Trykksos, one of the last of the Sytrion Lf writers, are most apt for descrbing equally the conditions for the final death of Lf and sf:

The new decline was in truth a circling back. When a cultural form spawned by the markets established by far-off pod brothers and sisters pretends to escape from these markets by means of these markets, we know that a death of sorts is announced. The living death of the value-exchange-form. This is also the thrust of L’shbtui’s claim that “we find ourselves wedded to a form that was once provocative and stimulating but has now crashed, become corrupted, psychically reduced, and dying for lack of any further aggravation” (L’shbtui, No More Wonders, p. 478).

–Trykksos of Giydt, After the End of Everything (1426 D.E.E), p. 23.

But surely Trykksos and L’shbtui are both too circumspect. Lf never achieved what those of the Eggs of the After-Now Circle aspired to do. Just as Gernsback’s sf itself became a thing of endless speculation and profit rather than a memory of a preparation.

Sf first imagines its death as a type of life eternal, as anticipation of the coming techno-utopian millennium of the near and far futures and as literary propaganda to these ends. It is primarily as the latter that sf first flourished then failed. The life eternal of the 1930s had become somewhat quaint and shopworn by the 1960s and 70s. And yet in many of the essentials, the so-called calling into question of this past was also its decadent rediscovery, whether as ironic citation or recontextualization in so-called postmodern sf. Here death was a rebirth, Nietzsche’s eternal return mashed up with a Hegelian gyre, or spiral, or some such. Perhaps Hegel views a spectral Nietzsche in a time scanner received as a gift from an unwritten future? Or more like William Gibson’s Schopenhauer Variance (1986)?

What about a melange of H. P. Lovecraft and Georges Bataille? Old Ones, Cthulhu, Yig, Tsathoggua, so many iterations of Death, the Destroyer. One must remain joyful in the face of Nyarlathotep or Shub-Niggurath. Homo sapiens, whose name names one lonely outcrop of this indefatigable being, tries to make sense out of this reign of deviant forms (this rain of swerves…) whose unnameable ur state we have henceforth named, is the literal non-literal nothing, the non-being nor becoming that became something. Singularity. We are mutants all in this pustulant forever changing.

Could it be that ideas are subject to the laws of natural selection? This, at least, was what the Sytrion critic L’kvipasurh proposed in the pathbreaking survey of Lf, Free of All Sacs (alt. ‘Free of all compartments’, 1368 D.E.E). Any form, cultural, social, natural, descends with modifications or ascends, as the case may be. It is all a question of perspective, albeit on the basis of finite dimensions in an apparent infinity; or is that infinite dimensions in a breathtakingly large finitude? What if an idea is more akin to a meander, though always embodied, and forever chaffing at this material basis in the form of the thinker or more precisely the meat which dreams—simultaneously—or so I am told, of an end to corporeality by paradoxical way of its boundless extension and the insatiable technological appetite for its utter extinction.  

Some advocates of such ideas about ideas have seen fit to consider market competition as a type of process akin to natural selection. But this is to misapprehend the intentionality of the market, in its so-called hidden and explicit forms, for a type of intelligence that can be applied to each and everything–which it can, no doubt, but at costs beyond even its wildest dreams. Can we consider the market a type of Artificial Intelligence, created by humans thousands of years ago alongside other types of artificial intelligence and creation: different forms of individual and cooperative activity and language both written and unwritten?

As Darwin pointed out the apparent success or failure of an individual and even of a species can be and is often just the result of contingency. Arguably this is also present in market relations. But in these respective processes the powers of intentionality and conscious cooperation are not symmetrical. The plant that survives on the edge of the desert, or the idea that flitters into being whether in a clever ape or silicon based lifeform, might be plain lucky. And yet this accident also in part disguises the necessity of a process that has been literally written in the stone for those of us who came after, transposed from a hieroglyphic that bears little relation to any known alphabet. Yes, it is true that giants once ruled the Earth, beasts as cunning in their stupidity as the human often is and still aspires to be. But the human has this over the beasts, as Marx put it: they build in their imagination before and apart from their other material practice.

‘Man’ (sic.) was once the answer to the riddle of the Sphinx. But how many such riddles have been spun and left hanging since time itself began? Planck Time, the Korolev Period, M’l’fak’s Constant, creation of the Universe, the Comic Egg. Humanity: a passing universal that will die long before death itself. The harsh beauty of its age, the scars that trace a map of experience obvious and lost in the wrinkles and other paths charted by the invisible cartographies of time and forgetfulness. This map will also fade through its successive printings until noise overcomes the most stringent of recording practice and principles. Our Morlock future; an Eloi heaven of indolence and the ragged call to the underground vats. The riddle of the Sphinx finally solved by a brutalising division of labour and ease. The human is no more so there can be no longer a question. We must ask a new one. What speaks in the morning , laments through the long afternoon, lies mute in the evening of an era?

Can this ruse be maintained? Is that all this is, all any product of this shady being that calls itself, grandiloquently, Humanity, Man, Homo Sapien, Superior? Much of the last six or seven thousand years or so of recorded Terran history have been recast as sf. The sf iterations of such are legion, more numerous that the historical models of which they constitute plagiarisms of sorts, détournements in the situationist vernacular. And yet the extent of these fictional peoples and empires, quantitatively outweighing by the metric tonne the literary remnants of the previous six thousand years, make up themselves a relatively brief moment of this greater cycle of human “cultures” and “civilizations”. Just as Sytrion Lf similarly constitutes a vanishingly brief moment of the fifteen thousand years of recorded D’l’ax’n and Sytrion histories.

–from Goberg Tilsane, ‘No More Tomorrows,’ (272), pp. 35-38.

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