Parabolas of Science Fiction

3. Breaking the Frame

36 ) ) ) ( astonishing endings in speculative fiction. It begins amiably enough: it is subtitled “Hommage à Hope Mirrlees”—and seems to be an affectionate pastiche of the style and concerns of the author of Lud-in-the-Mist (1926). Like that novel, it depicts a seemingly small-scale confrontation—in this case, between a Duke (“a very evil man”) and a group of local workers in the very Mirrlees-esque town of Appletap-on-Flat. Despite the Duke’s status and fearsome words, the workers are led by a formidable figure, the local Miller’s daughter. (She is sometimes referred to as the Milleress, which is not too far from “Mirrlees.”) She seems to have magical powers and says to the Duke that she somehow created him. She then kisses him and makes him disappear. She speaks some final words to the shocked Appletappians: “Do not,” said the Miller’s daughter, “go around looking for the kingdom of Heaven as if it were a lost sheep, saying wow, here! and wow, there! because the kingdom of Heaven is inside you.” “Who are you,” said the people of Appletap-on-Flat, all kneeling down instanter, “who speak not as the scribes but with authority?” She said: “I’m the author. (Russ 1983, 244) On that note, the story ends—as does the collection of the same name that contains it—without even closing the quotation mark. It is a move whose shock comes partly from its suddenness and partly from its absolute finality. It is a shift of register, of what is at stake in the story, and of the very rules under which the story is being told. It might be argued that it teaches the readers that the basis on which they have understood the bulk of the story is as open to criticism as the content of the story. In a sense, this is what John Clute and David Langford have referred 3 Breaking the Frame graHam sleigHt Joanna Russ’s story “The Zanzibar Cat” (1971) has one of the most Breaking tHe frame ( ( ( 37 to—in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction—as a “slingshot ending.” That is, it is an ending that opens new perspectives not previously hinted at in the story. The canonical example here is the ending of A. E. van Vogt’s The Weapon Makers (1946), which as Clute and Langford say, “closes with a line that introduces a brand-new thought and a term not previously encountered in the book: ‘Here is the race that shall rule the Sevagram’” (2011). But Russ goes beyond van Vogt. Even with the limited information of this one line, the reader can interpret “Sevagram” as some kind of empire or dominion—an entity that could be the subject of another science fiction story. It exists within the frame of its genre. But Russ’s ending breaks that frame. There is no way one can imagine the ending of “The Zanzibar Cat” still being in the same fantasy genre as the body of the story. It is this kind of extreme breaking of genre “rules” that I want to consider in this chapter. Other chapters in this collection have set out a range of ways of understanding science fiction (sf) as an accumulation of tropes and moves— what John Rieder calls the “stockroom” of the genre. As Lisa Yaszek suggests in considering domestic sf, this accumulation can only take place gradually and requires the participation of both readers and writers: the model is one of a system feeding back into itself. So Russ’s story, which initially plays faithfully with certain well-loved items from the stockroom , likewise depends on knowledge of those items: their relation to each other, the tone in which the Mirrlees original is told, and the implicit and explicit boundaries embodied in the story. Yet any set of rules can be broken. Even though the parameters within which a work of fiction exists are rarely as algorithmic as “rules,” they too can be transgressed. In what follows, I want to discuss the relatively small class of fantastic works that visibly step outside their parabolas of story. To step outside of rules or parabolas requires consciousness of what those rules are: the story must be, as it were, self-conscious. Another, much-abused term for this is, of course, that they must be postmodern. Postmodernity, though the word has many definitions and applications, is generally agreed to have two central attributes.The first is that it distrusts...