Tuned In

For two decades few critics have done more than Larry McCaffery to map the terrain of contemporary American fiction. His book The Metafictional Muse (1982) was one of the first in-depth studies of 1960s and 1970s American metafiction. His edition of essays on contemporary science-fiction, Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science Fiction (1991), is a seminal collection of some of the most interesting and genuinely serious essays about the current SF scene. Editor of the journals Fiction International and Critique, McCaffery has also in the recent past been in charge of an issue of Postmodern Culture devoted to postmodern fiction. Add to these things his more recent work as an editor—his massive Postmodern Fiction: A Bio-Bibliographic Guide (1986); his editions of Avant-Pop fiction, Avant-Pop: Fiction for a Daydream Nation (1993) and After Yesterday’s Crash: The Avant-Pop Anthology (1995); as well as a forthcoming edition of essays on one of America’s first postmodern fictioneers, Raymond Federman: From A to X-X-X-X—and it becomes clear just how extensive and expansive is his contribution to the study of the diverse field of contemporary writing.

This bibliography, however, does not cover what is perhaps McCaffery’s most significant contribution to the study of contemporary fiction: his continuing series of interviews with cutting-edge experimental American writers. Beginning in 1983 with Anything Can Happen: Interviews with Contemporary American Novelists, which he co-edited with Tom LeClair, McCaffery went on to produce Alive and Writing: Interviews with American Authors of the 1980s (1987), which he co-edited with Sinda Gregory, and Across the Wounded Galaxies: Interviews with Innovative Science Fiction Writers (1990). These collections have now been joined by a fourth, Some Other Frequency: Interviews with Innovative American Authors.

While McCaffery is careful to avoid broadly labeling as “postmodern” the contemporary writers he interviews, the ideas that the first three collections trace, in one shape or another, are ones most readers will recognize as postmodern. Anything Can Happen, a collection of 1970s writers, focuses on artists in particular with a “common sense that crisis was [in the 1960s and 1970s] at hand, for literature and society at large—and that extreme measures were needed to rescue the novel and the community from the grips of outmoded assumptions” (AW 1). Alive and Writing is primarily interested in seeing how this crisis comes out; its galvanizing question asks how 1980s writers take advantage of the battles won by the writers included in ACH. The writers included “in this volume simply take it for granted that many of the features of postmodernism that once seemed extreme...are perfectly valid ways for approaching the creation of fiction” (AW 2). Across the Wounded Galaxies takes as its premise that the study of SF has by 1990 become a serious institution; this is because SF itself is not only a central influence upon the styles of our times, but because it has been influenced by some of our time’s major ideas. These ideas, one of which is that in this quantum age we cannot divorce science from the arts, is for better or worse recognizably postmodern.

Although continuing the earlier collections’ interests in innovative (or fringe or experimental)¹ American authors, Some Other Frequency seems at first glance unwilling to commit to McCaffery’s overarching interest in postmodernism. In terms of the authors that McCaffery includes, there is no postmodern party line, or at least certainly not the kind of party line shared by some of the breakthrough postmodern innovators—Coover, Barthelme, Sukenick, Federman, Katz.² In fact, it seems at times as if the only party line ascribed to by the writers included in Some Other Frequency is that they are not postmodern, or even necessarily avant-garde. As McCaffery sums up this point in his introduction, not only do “very few of the authors interviewed [in the collection] feel any sense of kinship to the concept of ‘postmodernism’ however that term is defined,” but it is also difficult for these authors to...