Rarely does an academic book set out its basic thesis so succinctly as the first page of John Rieder’s fascinating exploration of genre theory—so succinctly that I’m rather loathe to paraphrase, lest I muddy the waters. Nonetheless, here we go: the system of genres of which science fiction is a familial member (along with fantasy, horror, romance and others) is distinct from the system of “classical” genres beloved of academic literary scholarship (i.e. the tragedy, the epic, etcetera); that genre system of which science fiction is a member is associated with large-scale commercial production and distribution of texts across multiple media (books, film, television), and is thus labelled by Rieder as “the mass-cultural genre system”. Early sf scholarship focussed on attempts to legitimise the genre through the identification and valorisation of exemplary texts; however, that process of legitimation is now a fait accompli, and Rieder argues that the new challenge for literary studies is take into account the tensions between these two different genre systems “that arise from different modes of publicity” (p1; sorry, I couldn’t help myself) or, rather, between the very different technological and discursive environments in which those systems operate(d).

Clear as mud? Rieder rephrases it a bit by positioning the book as “an exercise in literary history based on the implications of taking a historical, rather than formalist, position on genre theory […by] understanding systemic change rather than individual innovation” (p2). This means that studying genres stops being about studying the supposedly groundbreaking techniques of a few celebrated authors, and becomes more about studying the network of relationships between writers, readers, publishers, publicists, printers, distributors, advertisers, booksellers and more. A laudable and logical goal only slightly undermined by the presence of a case-study of Philip K Dick later in the book—Dick being about as canonical a celebrated subject of sf scholarship as one could think of.

Snarky quibbles aside—the Dick chapter, like the rest of the book, is good enough to have made me a little jealous—SFatMCGS is basically what happens when fairly cutting-edge sociology and literary scholarship meet up, compare notes, and find that they’re both bored with the same old contorted attempts at genre taxonomy. So Suvin’s “literature of cognition estrangement” is out—not because sf is never cognitively estranging, but because that’s far from all that sf is or has ever been, and also because actually-existing science fiction is not a theoretical entity, and Suvin’s attempt to make it one is an act of cultural hegemony of exactly the sort that Suvin claimed to be opposing.

(Though as Rieder argues, Suvin was writing at a time when hostility to genre scholarship of any sort was pretty much the default position across the academy, and his definition of sf can thus be read as an attempt—and a fairly successful one, in hindsight—to woo the gatekeepers on its behalf.)

The point being: genres change, and formalist definitions such as Suvin’s thus become obsolete (or, perhaps more accurately, are retrospectively revealed as selective simplifications). Instead, suggests Rieder, genres are produced by mass-cultural systems which “are composed of the values, not always explicit or simple, that direct competent readers to recognise genres, perform them, and enforce or resist their boundaries”. (p4; that “enforce OR resist” is important, as I’ll show shortly.)

Rieder argues that the mass-cultural genre system’s instinct for classifying texts is commercially oriented (i.e. aimed at getting said texts into the hands of a receptive and, ideally, paying audience), rather than academically oriented (i.e. aimed at patient comparative analysis for systematisation’s own sweet sake): “since sf takes shape within the milieu of mass culture, its general form is ‘determined’ by mass culture insofar as generic form is itself the cumulative effect of economic and ideological pressures upon artistic production”. (p10) Assuming that’s the case, then to understand how sf came to be recognised, practiced and (re)produced, we should look at the socioeconomic and technopolitical environment from which it emerged, rather than seeking to define it in terms of formal effects, a la Suvin.

As such, sf is a site of contestation—as anyone who ever got into an “is [x] science fiction?” debate knows all too well—but is also a site of some agreement over generic identity, because otherwise there would be nothing to contest. Here Rieder mobilises the sociological notion of the “community of practice”, which is hard to summarise, but has a lot to do with large heterogeneous groups (or groups of groups) who all identify with something while simultaneously holding a variety of different ideas about the thing they all identify with; “the identity of sf is constituted by this very web of sometimes inconsistent and competing assertions” (p5).

What that means is that, to simplify in a provocative but useful way, the Puppies, both Sad and Rabid, have had as vital a role to play in sf’s ongoing evolution as have the Social Justice Warriors from whom they saw themselves as trying to save it. Indeed, it’s precisely these conflicts over the “boundaries and protocols” of the genre that make it a vital thing, constantly reinventing itself: the epic has always been and will always be the epic, but science fiction (and fantasy, and horror, and etcetera) will always be a moving target.

But this also implies that progress (and/or progressiveness) is anything but inevitable: sf can only ever be that which those who care abut sf are willing to work to make it be. Or, as Neil Young put it: rust never sleeps.