Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System. John Rieder

to the difference between modern, popular genre categories and ancient, classical ones. “Many film scholars and critics use the term ‘popular genre’ to denote literary types like the western or the detective story that are clearly the same as what I call formulas…. Another usage of genre involves concepts like tragedy, comedy, romance, and satire…. Since such conceptions clearly imply universal or transcultural conceptions of literary structure, they are examples of what I have called archetypes” (6–7). A different way to put this is that the classical genre system is very much older and more prestigious than the mass cultural one, and it has been relatively stable for long periods of time. There is no question that many a television sitcom employs devices that one can find in Roman comedy. This does not justify turning comedy or tragedy into a universal category, as Cawelti does. But interestingly, Cawelti’s distinction between formula and archetype depends entirely on context: “If one thinks of a western in comparison to other westerns one is using a ‘formula-genre’ … [but if you] relate this same western to some more universal generic conceptions such as tragedy or romance … [you] would be employing an archetype-genre” (8). In other words, one system of classification works for commercial production, another for the academy; the hierarchical relation between them is entirely obvious in the terms “formula” and “archetype.” That hierarchy of values deserves to be reexamined in the light of the forty years’ worth of cultural studies work that Cawelti helped make possible.

      Although the subsystems of value set at play in the relation of the two genre systems to one another are central to the arguments of this book, the topic is a single genre, science fiction. My primary thesis regarding SF is that it is an organic genre of the mass cultural genre system. I draw the term “organic” here from Antonio Gramsci’s distinction between traditional intellectuals, whose roles in the social system are residual effects of past cultural formations, and organic intellectuals who rise spontaneously to perform the work of organizing production and politics within the contemporary formation (5–17). I suggest that the same distinction one would apply to the intellectuals working within the entertainment industry and the academy can usefully be applied to the genre systems that in significant ways help to organize their labors. The relation between the genre system organic to mass culture and the traditional genre system, lodged primarily in the schools, produces effects of stratification that pervade the entire field of modern literary production. I contend that instead of merely being manipulated by those effects, literary and cultural studies scholars in general, and science fiction studies scholars in particular, ought to be making them part of the object of their inquiries into the workings of contemporary culture and the powers exercised by various forms of narrative within it.

      The thesis that science fiction is an organic genre of mass culture does not imply that mass cultural practices necessarily or inevitably included the development of this specific kind of fiction. I am not arguing that SF expresses the essence of mass culture or that the political economy of mass culture is expressed by or reflected in SF. The argument advanced here is simply that since SF takes shape within the milieu of mass culture, its generic form is “determined” by mass culture insofar as generic form is itself the cumulative effect of economic and ideological pressures upon artistic production. If SF developed within the set of artistic and commercial opportunities and constraints afforded by the emergence of mass culture, then understanding these constraints and opportunities is crucial to an account of how the genre came to be recognized and practiced. We should expect to find that genre construction both follows the channels of least resistance and registers the traces of collective desire.

      To assert that SF is organic to mass culture is also to highlight the way constructing, maintaining, and contesting the category of SF actively intervenes in promoting the distribution of a certain kind of fiction. It names that fiction, in the first place, bringing it into visibility and constituting it as an object. The generic category subsequently acts as a matrix for communicating practices of writing and reading among artists, editors, and readers (modes of participation that overlap heavily in the culture of the SF pulp magazines), involving them in ongoing debates about the genre’s boundaries and protocols that feed back into artistic practices while constructing the genealogies and canons of a “selective tradition” subject to continual reinvention.

      The term “selective tradition” appears in quotation marks because I draw it from Andrew Milner’s Locating Science Fiction, a book that in its project and ambitions seems to me quite consonant with this one. “Selective tradition” is a term Milner borrows from Raymond Williams, who explains it as “an intentionally selective version of a shaping past and a pre-shaped present, which is then powerfully operative in the process of social and cultural definition and identification” (Milner 39, quoting Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, 115). Milner argues in Locating Science Fiction that because SF is a selective tradition it is therefore “essentially and necessarily a site of contestation” (39–40). But first it has to be the site of some agreement about generic identity; otherwise there would be nothing to contest. The key term for me in conceptualizing this basic agreement is the community of practice. As I will argue in chapter 1 and elaborate more fully in chapters 5 and 6, the genre of SF is the product of multiple communities of practice whose motives and resources may have little resemblance to one another.

      Before explaining the plan of the book, let me acknowledge some of its limitations, however briefly. It is a sketch of the history of SF, but only a sketch and a very selective one at that. I am under no illusion that the several dozen texts I write about in this book constitute some sort of representative sample of the entire genre. My narrative focuses on English-language SF and mostly American SF. I do not think or mean to imply that the influence of mass culture or the dynamics of cultural prestige attached to literary traditions and popular entertainments in America is a model or prototype for the rest of the world. The book is entirely devoted to the analysis of print and film SF to the exclusion of digital media or games, even though I am quite aware of how important they have become both commercially and culturally. Similarly, although there are two chapters about communities of practice, I have hardly brushed the surface of what could be said about SF fan cultures or contemporary participatory cultures. I can only hope that scholars who know more than I do about other national traditions of SF, digital media, fan cultures, and the rest of SF’s myriad array of venues and practices can make some use of my work in those areas of research.

      Here, then, is the plan of the book. Chapter 1 is a minimally revised version of an essay published in Science Fiction Studies in 2010 under the same title. It is devoted to basic issues of genre theory in relation to the problem of defining the genre of SF. Chapter 2 picks up the theoretical issues of chapter 1 in order to elaborate a description of the mass cultural genre system as a whole. The rest of the chapters explore some problems in writing the history of SF based on the theoretical groundwork laid in the first two chapters. Chapter 3 takes up the question of generic origins by arguing that the genealogy of SF is better approached in terms of systemic changes than the influence of individual texts. Chapter 4 is devoted to the issue of SF’s status within the traditional literary canon via an extended reading of the novels of Philip K. Dick. Chapters 5 and 6 turn to more recent SF to examine some of the effects of homogeneity and heterogeneity corresponding to the genre’s mass cultural and subcultural communities of practice. Here, as in the chapter on Dick, I am also concerned with the kind of critical and anti-hegemonic power SF narratives often exercise. This critical power does not depend on SF’s formal grammar, but rather on the way some narratives appropriate and recode the genre’s resources. I am especially concerned in chapters 5 and