When will we ever tire of angsting over the elusive and ever-more-fuzzy border between science fiction and literary fiction? No time soon, I’d wager: genres are, after all, not unlike nation-states, and it takes a lot of what sociologists call “boundary work” to keep a conceptual territory coherent over time. For some, the answer is to build walls and fences—a vogueish strategy1, certainly, though one lacking in precedent for its success over the long term. But for others, the answer lies in understanding why those who cross borders choose to do so.
Tachyon have a lengthy and commendable history of putting that latter strategy to work, having produced a handful of anthologies prior to this one (such as the slipstream antho Feeling Very Strange, or the excellent-if-contentious Secret History of Science Fiction) which probe at the crosshatched interstices of the genre, focussing on its rogue’s gallery of émigrés, ex-pats, surly hermits and pioneering forebears. In this most recent volume, Tachyon honcho Jacob Weisman turns his attention to the genre’s immigrants as a way of getting at the more vexed matter of its lingering exceptionalism: if we’re not willing to concede that it’s science fiction, Weisman asks, then what is it that these non-genre writers are writing?
“All sorts of stuff” would appear to be the simplest answer to that question, with the greatest strength of Invaders being its tonal variety. Deji Bryce Olukotun’s “We Are The Olfanauts” takes the oh-so-contemporary dystopian tech-start-up template and transposes it from California to Kenya; Steven Millhauser’s “A Precursor of the Cinema” goes all Borges on the coevolutionary history of art and technology; Max Apple rehumanises the mad professor trope in “The Yogurt of Vasirin Kefirovsky”; Molly Gloss’s “Lambing Season” plays a light-touch first contact riff in the deep-country key of Annie Proulx; Junot Dias drops disaster onto the Caribbean while his disaffected protagonist looks on in “Monstro”. Human experimental subjects escape their laboratories; dementia patients recall their pasts, even the bits they’d rather not remember; baffled protagonists wake to find themselves barricaded into a Ballardian nightmare with no exit or entrance; dissatisfied housewives answer misdelivered letters from forgotten inventors. It’s a mixed batch, certainly, but gloriously so.
That these stories should be so varied is no great surprise, but the implicit question remains: what is it that marks them as not-sf, or as not-quite- or not-entirely-sf? It’s clearly not a question of style or vibe, or even of publication venue.
I think maybe Weisman hits the nail on the head in his introduction, where he remarks en passant that the anthology contains “a lot more stories about sex and relationships because that’s what you’d find in the mainstream magazines.” I’m not sure how true that claim may be, but it does offer a new way to look at this old dichotomy: if we can claim that, broadly speaking, the science fiction genre is distinguished by its focus on relationships between people and technology, then it follows that other, less marginal literatures are more focussed on relationships between people and other people. The liminal set which Weisman has here assembled would seem to represent what happens when those two approaches to narrative are reconciled to some degree: stories about relationships between people and other people as mediated by technology.
Of course, one could argue that the distinction I’m making is subjective, or tautologous, or both—but such are the perils of discussing literature. A more constructive argument might be that an increasing amount of sf qua sf is moving its narrative focus in the same direction; if that’s so, why is that stuff sf, but this stuff somehow not sf?
The answer is perhaps implicit in the title of the book: the not-sf-ness of this stuff is inherent not in its tropes, themes, styles or even its values, but in its origins. Its otherness is a function of the outsider status within which it has been framed; it is not-quite-sf because it is collected in a book which takes the existence of not-quite-sf as an ontological given. Of course, this is a clear advance and improvement over that older ontology, wherein the universe comprises only sf and not-sf… but it nonetheless produces a liminality, a state of statelessness: these stories remain not-quite-sf in the same way that, to a certain sort of British person, the English spoken by a citizen of the former colonies (or, indeed, of the post-industrial hinterland) can never be more than not-quite-English. It’s not the language that matters so much as who is speaking.
It says something important (and more than a little sad) about the legacy culture of science fiction that even an anthology aimed sincerely at broadening the generic territory and making the borders more porous couldn’t avoid a title that frames immigrants as invaders—ironic, too, given the genre’s ineluctable relationship with colonialism and empire. To be very clear, that’s no slight on Weisman, nor on Tachyon: this is a fine book from a reliably interesting and adventurous publisher, and I commend it unto you. But through it we are reminded that genres, like nations, are really just identities—one more way of sorting Them from Us, no matter how generous and inclusive the taxonomy. The not-quite-sf-ness of these immigrant stories lies not in the stories themselves, but in the way we see their writers: the gap lies not in their writing, but in our reading thereof.
- This is a dig at the 45th occupant of the US Oval Office, who was at time of writing making a lot of noise about building a wall along Mexico’s northern border which Mexico would pay for. ↩︎