Towards a Language for Science Fiction Studies
Authors: Butler Andrew M. 
Published: October 2020

As the science fictional years come upon us -- 1999, 2000, 2001 -- there is a sense that this is the future, and nothing much has changed. Indeed, the future has turned out to be pretty much like the past, but with Tamagotchis and Karaoke. Beyond Darko Suvin's adoption of the term "novum" and the souls sold to the demons of postmodernism, the criticism of science fiction remains more or less the same as it did thirty years ago, except that it is now often written by people who have only read Neuromancer. It is high time that this critical apparatus was shaken up. The various techniques and devices in the arsenal of the contemporary science-fiction writer need to be explored anew. In The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, Clute and Grant introduced a series of terms, such as "polder" and "instauration", which they made use of in their analyses of the fantastic mode1. It is hoped that the terms I introduce gain similar currency. In the limited space I have available, I can only explore the terminology of plot.
The key to the popular fictional genres, both visual and literary, is that they are defined by a certain sense of familiarity with the material, a familiar engendered by repetition with difference. Even within this overall scheme of generic recognition, there is a stage further when a plot is borrowed entire from another work. It is clearly easy for a writer to borrow a plot from someone else, as it is known that it already works, has already pleased readers and rations out the degree of originality in a genre which depends upon originality.
For example, Dan Simmons's Hyperion has a series of characters telling each other stories to pass the time on a journey: obviously this is Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. But in addition to that it is a gathering together of disparate characters, who are going to go and visit this wonderful, strange being, to ask for their deepest desires. As I read this, I began to wonder whether one of them wanted a brain and one of them wanted a heart and one of them wanted courage and one of them wanted to go back to Kansas. This is of course the structure of The Wizard of Oz. Hyperion is thus Canterbury Tales meets Wizard of Oz sung to the tune of Keats, and is therefore hailed as being startlingly original. At the end of Hyperion, as the characters go off to see the Wizard, one character bursts into song:
'What's that song you're singing to Rachel?'
The scholar forced a grin and scratched his short beard. 'It's from an ancient flat film...'
'But who is the wizard?' asked Colonel Kassad...
'And what is Oz?' asked Lamia.
'And just who is off to see this wizard?' (Hyperion 500-1)

In order to avoid charges of plagiarism, Simmons reveals his sources, or, to be more charitable, acknowledges the intertextual borrowing which he has been engaged in.
Another plot which gets used again and again is in cyberpunk, where the non-spatial realm of cyberspace stands in for the realm of the dead, the Underworld, and an analogue for Orpheus is sent to rescue a version of Eurydice: a female is kidnapped by a god of the Underworld, and a male hero has to rescue her, only to be trapped behind himself. This is the plot which underlies Vurt, Snow Crash, and one of the less obvious cyberpunk classics, Mythago Wood. The titular wood is a realm whose interior dimensions do not match the exterior's, rather like cyberspace. The main character's entry into the wood to rescue his brother and mother / sister-in-law / lover strikes a suitable note of incest, and the beings encountered there are mythic archetypes. As Pollen was to make clear, the Underworld is the realm of the collective unconscious, the realm of Story, Myth and Archetype2.
The great trilogy of the 1990s, Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy, borrows the structure of The Lord of the Rings. In Fellowship of the Ring a group of disparate characters come together and set off on a mission, there's a great calamity following a betrayal and they are all scattered. In the next volume, The Two Towers, the scattered characters wander around aimlessly, not really achieving anything, and there's a couple of battles or revolutions. Finally in The Return of the King there are last climatic battles, councils of peace, characters die of old age and there's a sense of loss, that the world has been changed, but for the next generation. Compare this to the structure of Robinson's epic: in Red Mars a group of disparate characters (the First Hundred) come together and set off on a mission to Mars, there's a great calamity following a betrayal and they are all scattered. In Green Mars the scattered characters wander around aimlessly, not really achieving anything, and there's a couple of battles or revolutions. Blue Mars depicts a final climatic battle, councils of peace, characters die of old age -- as does the reader -- and there's a sense of loss, that the world has been changed, but for the next generation. (Curiously Kim Stanley Robinson next work, Antarctica, was a reworking of Blue Mars, but without the Mars, a feature it also shares with Lord of the Rings.)
Repetition in narratives happens with entire works, but also within narratives. These are known as Cookie Dough Plots. Home-made cookies are made by using cutters which produce the same shape again and again from dough. In the same way, narratives can be constructed from a series of broadly similar events which are repeated ad infinitum. A recent example of this is Dan Simmons's Endymion (1996), where the entire plot is organised around the two poles of: 'We're being chased' and 'Phew, we've escaped'. This fills up over four hundred pages.
The Ping Pong Plot is one where two plotlines interconnect and are told alternatively: two sets of characters are involved in two separate storylines, where the action is occurring simultaneously and the author cuts between the two. William Gibson does this a lot in his fiction, with increasing numbers of character sets.
Strangely enough, great science fiction of twenty or thirty years ago was around two hundred pages in length, and great science fiction of today is around the four hundred page mark. It's twice the size of an old novel. Most of these novels use the Ping Pong Plot, with events alternating between two sets of characters who usually, but not always, meet up by page four hundred. They might as well be in separate novels. In fact what we appear to have in today's great science fiction, is two novels. As no-one would pay $50 for a two hundred page novel, they get two for the price of one, shuffled in accordance to the rules of Ping Pong.
In Jovah's Angel, by Sharon Shinn, there are two sets of characters: the first plot is an angel looking for her mortal beloved soul mate or perfect man and the second is a man wandering around. And reading it, the reader thinks, 'Ooh, I wonder who her perfect man is going to be? Ooh, there's another 390 pages to find out.' The novel is an example of the Ping Pong Cookie Dough Plot variant, where the chase-escape-chase format is enlivened by switching -- Ping-Ponging -- between the chaser and the chased.
In Jovah's Angel, by Sharon Shinn, there are two sets of characters: the first plot is an angel looking for her mortal beloved soul mate or perfect man and the second is a man wandering around. And reading it, the reader thinks, 'Ooh, I wonder who her perfect man is going to be? Ooh, there's another 390 pages to find out.' The novel is an example of the Ping Pong Cookie Dough Plot variant, where the chase-escape-chase format is enlivened by switching -- Ping-Ponging -- between the chaser and the chased.
Perhaps the most significant example of this Timeslip Ping Pong in recent years is Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow (1996), where the action alternates between the account of the preparation for the voyage and the voyage itself and the account of the aftermath of the voyage. There's the before of events and the after of events, moving towards the discovery of the dark secret at the heart of the tale. It doesn't quite keep up the Ping Pong, as some chapters slip into the past or the future, and the Pings are not sufficiently distinguishable from the Pongs.
In the past, series of novellas or novels used a variation on the Timeslip Ping Pong Plot, where the events and resolution of one story sets up the problem for the next. Rather than a series of sequels, what often happened was a number of sequels and prequels, until the final, ultimate and closing Prelude. (In a sense this is what Jack Womack is doing in his Dryco sequence).
One variation on this should be known -- after E.E. 'Doc' Smith's novels -- as the My-Ultimate-Weapon-Is-More-Ultimate-Than-Yours-Is Sequence. In every Lensman novel there is an Ultimate Weapon, a weapon too dreadful to use, which they use after all, since they have it around, cluttering up the place. Fortunately for the sequence, the UW can be countered by the Ultimate Strategic Defense Initiative (or USDI) which is much more ultimate, and an even more UW. By the time you get to the eighth novel in the sequence, the UW of the first book ought to be renamed the Antipenultimate Antipenultimate Antipenultimate Antipenultimate Antipenultimate Antipenultimate Penultimate Ultimate Weapon.
The preceding terminology covers the major versions of narratives used within contemporary science fiction, narratives which it seems likely will dominate the next century of science fiction. Similarly the same sorts of settings, which I hope to explore elsewhere, will dominate: in particular the rainy city, post-holocaust and the next five minutes (although the pre-millennial tension setting is clearly now obsolete).

Footnotes

A "polder" is a realm which is deliberately maintained as separate and distinct from the outside world (Clute 772-3). "Instauration fantasies" are those where "the real world is transformed" (Clute 501).
For cyberpunk and the underworld narrative see Joan Gordon, "Yin and Yang Duke It Out", in Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Postmodern Science Fiction, ed. Larry McCaffery (Durham and London: Duke UP, 1991). For a longer exploration of Mythago Wood see my article in Vector 192 (March/April 1997): 4, and my "Journeys beyond Being: The Cyberpunk-Flavoured Novels of Jeff Noon", Novel Turns: The Novel in Europe Now, ed. by John Gatt-Rutter (forthcoming). The term "cyberpunk-flavoured" is one I coined for a discussion of the works of Jeff Noon: the novels share a number of characteristics of cyberpunk, whilst not necessarily being unproblematically cyberpunk. A tradition of works which have a realm analogous to cyberspace, or a realm which serves a comparative narrative need, could be identified; Borges's use of the term "precursor" might be useful here to characterise such a tradition, although as Mythago Wood is more or less contemporary with Neuromancer it cannot properly be a precursor. The cyberspatial realm of the Vurt feather is something between an interior mental landscape and a computer game; the wood realm of Mythago Wood is somewhere between an interior mental landscape which can be simulated / created / entered with the use of electrical stimulation on the brain and a secondary world.

References

Clute, John, and John Grant, eds. The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. London: Orbit: 1997

Citation reference for this article
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