The Span of Mainstream and Science Fiction (review)

Such is the shifting nature of literature these days that literary studies frequently witnesses challenges to the boundaries between so-called mainstream fiction and various other prose genres. Indeed, many of the finest works produced in the last few decades deliberately blur these boundaries, incorporating elements of journalism, memoirs, detective, or science fiction into works that feature hallmarks of mainstream literature such as fragmented narrative. Literary scholars have spent considerable time interrogating this blurring of boundaries, and in The Span of Mainstream and Science Fiction, Peter Brigg joins them. The object of his study is to map a new literary space, one that occupies the territory between mainstream literary fiction and science fiction. He suggests that the “work of both groups of these writers can be better understood within a new genre, where the expectations of the uses of science in and as fiction may be more clearly defined and where various experimental uses of form can be domiciled with the scientific element” (188). He calls this new genre span fiction, the characteristics of which his study sets out to establish.

Brigg draws the parameters of span fiction early in the book, asserting that “Science and its muscular sibling, technology, have transformed the world and the way human beings see it and behave in it.” As a consequence, both mainstream fiction and science fiction have seen their boundaries weakened; a number of mainstream fiction writers, Brigg says, “have now turned to explore strange horizons and find opportunities to express parts of their vision that realms new to them (but the stock-in-trade of the science fiction writer) will permit” (5). At the same time, he comments that “some recent science fiction is reaching towards the mainstream of literature with steadily increasing subtlety of style, an active flirtation with postmodernist techniques, a growing attention to the complexities of character and situation, and an increasing complexity of attitude to both science and the form of traditional science” (6). As Brigg argues throughout his study, the place in which these two genres overlap is the space in which his new genre of span fiction emerges and then flourishes. Having established the terms of his discussion, Brigg devotes the remainder of his book to examining literature that he claims is span fiction, with two chapters devoted to close readings of mainstream writers who also wrote span fiction and two chapters devoted to broader assessments of span tendencies in the works of mainstream and science fiction writers.

The first two chapters deal at some depth with two mainstream writers whom Brigg contends also wrote span fiction. His discussions of both Doris Lessing and Thomas Pynchon draw out more fully Brigg's concept of span and are to my mind the best chapters in the book. His treatment of Lessing is particularly fine, focusing sharply on her use of Freudian and Laingian psychology in the creation of alternate realities in novels starting with The Four-Gated City (1969) and extending through the work of the next decade. He ably demonstrates that Lessing’s fiction presented science as integral to her world-view but that in so doing she retained the finely wrought prose and depth of characterization that marked the finest of her mainstream fiction. The fusion of these two brings her work firmly into the realm of span fiction. Brigg's treatment of Pynchon also provides a strong case for placing his work within the new genre category, and his careful elucidation of the myriad ways in which science plays a central role in Pynchon's work—ranging from subject matter to structural metaphor—does justice to the complex ways in which Pynchon weaves science into his fiction. Of particular note is Brigg s treatment of entropy as a central concept in Gravity's Rainbow (1973). Entropy, as Brigg notes, “is one aspect of the speculation about order and disorder in the modern world which is carried on congruently on a number of levels” (65). Those levels include the philosophical, theological, political...