Shorter Views: Queer Thoughts & the Politics of the Paraliterary

16 The Second Science-Fiction Studies Interview: Of Trouble on Triton and Other Matters

The Second Science-Fiction Studies Interview Of Trouble on Triton and Other Matters The.following text did not originate as any kind of formal interview. Instead it grew out of an April 1986 session that Chip Delany had with me and my students in a courseI was teaching at Concordia University on Utopian and AntiUtopian (Science) Fiction. By the time this particular class meeting took place, we had already considered Stanislaw Lem 's Futurological Congress and Ursula Le Guin 's The Dispossessed, and had turned our attention to Delany's Triton. Two of the students, Diane Illing and Peta Kom, recorded that session; and perhaps a year thereafter, myformer assistant, Donna McGee, made a valiant effort to "decipher" their tapes. Her transcription sat atop one of my file cabinets until April of this year, when I finally found (or, rather, "made") time to verify and edit it. The resultant printout then went to Chip, who subjected it to substantial clarificatory revision. Except for Chip (SRD), the participants are all designated by an anonymous "Q"; but for the record, the questions not from me come mostly from Renee Lallier (of John Abbott College) and Robert Copp (now a doctoral candidate at McGill). —Robert M. Philmus Q: In Futurological Congress, Lem seems to be suggesting that SFis generated from neologisms. How do you react to that proposition? Did Triton, for example, in any way arise from the term-concept, "un-licensed sector ," say? SRD: Did it arise from the notion or from the term "un-licensed sector "? No. 16 316 Shorter Views As far as SF growing from neologisms, however, I do think there's a terribly important verbal side to SF, which your question can be used to foreground. Often, in SF,the writer puts together two word roots, and the resultant term produces a new image for the reader. Take Cordwainer Smith's "ornithopter." To read the word is to know what an ornithopter is—if you recognize the roots: helicopter and ornithos—a helicopter is a helicopter, of course, and ornithos is the Classical Greek word for bird. (In modern Greek, by the bye, ornithosjust means chicken.) An ornithopter must be a small plane that flaps itswings—like a bird. But even if you haven't seen one of Schoenherr's fine illustrations (that he produced for Dune when Herbert borrowed Smith's term), or had it explained to you, it still callsup the image. This verbal side to SFisveryimportant . The range of SF images is governed entirely by the sayable —rather than by any soft-edged concept like the scientifically believable or even the possible. Consider: "And there, just before me, I could smell the weight of the note D-flat!" At this point, of course, the "image" (if we can call it that) is fantasy— or perhaps surrealism. Or simplyspeakable nonsense. But it's not yet SF. Once we've spoken an image, however, it becomes the SF job of the surrounding rhetoric—especially the pseudo-scientific rhetoric—to make the image cognizable,believable: It came from the alternate universe Dr. Philmus's new invention had opened up when I'd pulled the lever—I could smell its weight, ringing out at me, through the glimmering circles of the indium coil that had opened a portal to a dimension in which such notions, philosophically absurd in ours, nevertheless exist, are common, and make sense . . . At this point, the image has become acceptable (conventional, hackneyed , even parodic—but recognizable) SF. The image is cognized through a set of codes by which you entail the sayable among a further set of images and ideas that you can visualize and/or conceptualize. As I've said, the one Ijust came up with (above) is both parodic and parasitic (parasitic on both philosophy and SF—as well as on our actual situation here, with Dr. Philmus standing right there), and thus brings up a whole further range of questions and considerations. But you get the general idea. There's often a literal side to SFlanguage. There are many stringsof words that can appear both in an SFtext and in an ordinary text of naturalistic fiction. But when they appear in a naturalistic text we interpret them one way, and when they appear in an SF text we interpret them The Second Science-Fiction Studies Interview 317 another. Let me illustrate this by some examples I've used many times...