The Routledge Introduction to Canadian Fantastic Literature

Allan Weiss

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000333725
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This study introduces the history, themes, and critical responses to Canadian fantastic literature. Taking a chronological approach, this volume covers the main periods of Canadian science fiction and fantasy from the early nineteenth century to the first decades of the twenty-first century. The book examines both the texts and the contexts of Canadian writing in the fantastic, analyzing themes and techniques in novels and short stories, and looking at both national and international contexts of the literature's history. This introduction will offer a coherent narrative of Canadian fantastic literature through analysis of the major texts and authors in the field and through relating the authors' work to the world around them.

1
TERMINOLOGY

The Problem of Terms

In 2003, Margaret Atwood was interviewed in Britain about her recently published novel, Oryx and Crake. She said that she did not write science fiction but rather “speculative fiction.” She explained to the Guardian that “science fiction has monsters and spaceships; speculative fiction could really happen”; in a BBC interview she said science fiction was about “talking squids in outer space,” whereas she wrote about scientific realities extended—or extrapolated—into the future. In her keynote address at the Academic Conference on Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy held the same year, she elaborated on the difference between the two genres as she saw it:

I liked to make a distinction between science fiction proper—for me, this label denotes books with things in them we can’t yet do or begin to do, talking beings we could never meet, and places we can’t go—and speculative fiction, which employs the means already more or less to hand, and takes place on Planet Earth.

(“Handmaid’s Tale” 11–12)

She made the same comparison in In Other Worlds (2011):

What I mean by “science fiction” is those books that descend from H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, which treats of an invasion by tentacled, blood-sucking Martians shot to Earth in metal canisters—things that could not possibly happen—whereas, for me, “speculative fiction” means plots that descend from Jules Verne’s books about submarines and balloon travel and such—things that really could happen but just hadn’t completely happened when the authors wrote the books. I would place my own books in this second category: no Martians. Not because I don’t like Martians, I hasten to add: they just don’t fall within my skill set. Any seriously intended Martian by me would be a very clumsy Martian indeed.

(6)

Atwood’s refusal to be identified as a writer of science fiction provoked immediate and hostile reaction because many in the “science fiction” community—authors, readers, and scholars—interpreted her remarks as an effort to distance herself from it. They believed that she was using what was seen as a more respectable term—“speculative fiction”—to deny any association with a genre that had a low cultural status. In an opinion piece for the Canadian “science fiction” magazine On Spec, author Peter Watts wrote that Atwood was “so terrified of sf-cooties that she’ll happily redefine the entire genre for no other reason than to exclude herself from it” (“Margaret Atwood” 4). Science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin reacted in a similar manner, saying that Atwood’s distinction between “science fiction” and “speculative fiction” “seems designed to protect her novels from being relegated to a genre still shunned by hidebound readers, reviewers and prize-awarders. She doesn’t want the literary bigots to shove her into the literary ghetto.”

Atwood was puzzled by the hostile reaction she received because she believed (and apparently continues to believe) that her distinction between science fiction and speculative fiction was the standard view. She has insisted that she never intended to show disrespect to science fiction but merely to distinguish what she wrote from what she has defined as science fiction. In her conference address, she said:

the radio person said she’d just been to a sci ficonference there, and some people were really, really mad at me. Why? said I, mystified. For being mean to science fiction, said she. In what way had I been mean? I asked. For saying I didn’t write it, she replied. And me having had the nerve to win the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Science Fiction.

(11)

Her distinction between the two genres, then, was designed to be descriptive and not evaluative. She was operating on certain beliefs about what differentiated science fiction from speculative fiction and assumed others agreed with her. The problem is that nobody else seems to use the terms this way, and so the people who attacked Atwood for her denial that she wrote science fiction misunderstood her meanings and motives.

Ironically, Atwood’s definition of “speculative fiction” is actually the original one. The term “speculative fiction” has been around for quite some time, and as Atwood told me in an email in 2009, she had seen it used frequently since she began researching fantastic literature as a graduate student:

It goes way back and has appeared in many articles & on many book covers. I use it specifically to mean something that could conceivably happen—the Jules Verne/Bellamy lineage—as opposed to the War of the World s one. I was doing my thesis in and around this area in the 1960s.

(25 September 2009)

The author usually credited with coining the term (although in truth it had been around since the nineteenth century), defining it, and popularizing it is Robert A. Heinlein. His definition of “speculative science fiction” is nearly identical to Atwood’s:

There is another type of honest-to-goodness science fiction story which is not usually regarded as science fiction: the story of people dealing with contemporary science or technology. We do not ordinarily mean this sort of story when we say “science fiction”; what we do mean is the speculative story, the story embodying the notion “Just suppose,” or “What would happen if—.” In the speculative science fiction story accepted science and established facts are extrapolated to produce a new situation, a new framework for human action.

(14–15)

Heinlein thus insists that “speculative science fiction” extrapolates from “accepted science and established facts” and that the real focus is on the social dimension of the extrapolation. Judith Merril said much the same thing in 1966:

I use the term “speculative fiction” here specifically to describe the mode which makes use of the traditional “scientific method” (observation, hypothesis, experiment) to examine some postulated approximation of reality, by introducing a given set of changes—imaginary or inventive—into the common background of “known facts,” creating an environment in which the responses and perceptions of the characters will reveal something about the inventions, the characters, or both.

(“What Do You Mean” 35–36)

Atwood must have encountered Heinlein’s (or Merril’s) term and definition during her early reading in the field. Another irony is that Heinlein was apparently doing what Atwood’s critics have accused her of doing: distancing his work from what was conventionally called “science fiction” (“another type of honest-to-goodness science fiction story which is not usually regarded as science fiction”). At the time, there were so-called “science fiction” pulp magazines—more on them later—that were publishing fiction with little real scientific grounding. It was the pulp tradition that caused “science fiction” to be associated with very un scientific, sensational, and not-very-respectable adventure stories for young males. Heinlein was trying to distinguish the scientifically rigorous works he wrote from the sort of implausible material being published as “science fiction” at the time. He clearly felt he needed a new term because of the way the term “science fiction” had been corrupted by the pulps. Nevertheless, people continued to call all fiction set on other worlds and in the future, with spaceships, robots, and “talking squids,” “science fiction.” The magazines were referred to as “science fiction” magazines despite the fact they published so much fiction that was not very scientific and even when they began publishing fantasy. Also, during the 1930s fans began gathering for what they called “science fiction conventions,” and this name has stuck even though they deal with fantasy, too. “Science fiction” had become the umbrella term for all fantastic literature intended for a popular audience. Yet it was still being used for a specific kind of fantastic literature—anything that was not fantasy—and so we frequently see “science fiction and fantasy” as a wordy catch-all phrase.

With the growing popularity of fantasy in recent decades, people in the field sought a different general term for all the fantastic genres, and many now prefer using “speculative fiction” for that purpose, seeing science fiction as a subset or genre within that category. For example, Wikipedia defines “speculative fiction” as

an umbrella term encompassing the more fantastical fiction genres, specifically science fiction, fantasy, horror, weird fiction, supernatural fiction, superhero fiction, utopian and dystopian fiction, apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction, and alternate history in literature as well as related static, motion, and virtual arts.

This is a very different meaning of “speculative fiction” from the one Heinlein had, and so we see the source of the confusion between Atwood and the vast majority of authors, readers, and scholars who work in the fantastic. She thought everybody had adopted Heinlein’s definition, not realizing the field had redefined the term radically. Meanwhile, to complicate matters further, many continue to use “science fiction” as the overarching term, or to “split the difference”—so to speak—by using the initials “SF” or “sf” without trying to specify what they stand for. As Peter Nicholls complains in his article on “speculative fiction” in the The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction:

Though the term has proved attractive to many, especially perhaps academics who find the term more respectable-sounding than “science fiction” and lacking the Pulp-magazine associations, nobody’s definition of “speculative fiction” has as yet demonstrated any formal rigour, though the term has come to be used with a very wide application.

The episode involving Margaret Atwood reveals an ongoing problem in the field. The criticism of Atwood would have carried more weight if there were universally agreed-upon definitions of “science fiction” and “speculative fiction,” but the fact is that authors, readers, and scholars use these terms and others in very different ways. Sometimes, they talk at cross-purposes, debating with each other without realizing that they are arguing on the basis of very different definitions. The study of fantastic literature has long suffered from this terminological confusion, and from the failed efforts of some to define “speculative fiction,” “science fiction,” “fantasy,” and “the fantastic” in ways that everyone can agree on. In fact, in some cases what the scholars have said actually contradicted what the authors and readers of these genres meant by the terms.

Realist vs. Fantastic/Mimetic vs. Non-mimetic

In this book, “fantastic fiction” or “fantastic literature” will be used as the umbrella term for science fiction, fantasy, utopian/dystopian fiction, alternate history, and other genres that portray things that violate our understanding of reality. While “speculative fiction” may be the most commonly used term, there are problems with it, as will shortly become clear. Many scholars prefer “fantastic” as a more inclusive and accurate term, like those who founded and named the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts (IAFA), a scholarly organization that holds the annual International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (ICFA).

What, then, is fantastic literature? As noted in the introduction, texts can be categorized by genre in various ways, so no single genre differentiation is the final word. One way we can distinguish works of fiction is by using two broad genre categories: realist fiction and fantastic fiction. Realist fiction offers an imitation of the real world as we understand it, which is commonly referred to in studies as the primary world. Contrary to what some critics have suggested, realist fiction does not hold up a mirror to society but rather imitates it. If it held up a mirror to society, then there would be no plot, as life offers no such well-organized sequence of events; no themes, as reality does not operate according to a common idea; and no imagery or symbols, as the world is made up of things, not comparisons. To be sure, there are forms of realist fiction that do endeavour to “mirror” life in all its plotless, directionless disorganization, like the French nouveau roman, but even the authors of such works carefully choose which incidents and thoughts to include in their novels. Authors almost always make artistic choices in what they portray, and most realist fiction strives to depict the world not directly but according to the conventions of the form. For example, supposedly “realistic” dialogue never really conforms to the way people speak to each other, lacking fillers like “um” and “ah,” and in fact when a fictional character uses one, the author may be signalling that the character is hiding something. There is a convention in first-person narratives that narrators have perfect recall—unless there are clues that the narrator is unreliable. Experienced readers are so used to these conventions of realist fiction that we accept them, ignoring how un realistic they may be. A realist novel imitates reality sufficiently to convince us that while the characters are fictional—we do not and are not supposed to mistake them for real people—the world they move around in is the one we know as our “consensual reality.” We call realist fiction mimetic, meaning that it is clearly meant to be an imitation of that reality, and we sometimes criticize such works for their “unrealistic” characterization, dialogue, and plots.

Fantastic fiction, by contrast, portrays worlds that violate our understanding of what is real, and is therefore non-mimetic; it does not imitate the world but contradicts what we know is or believe to be reality, and thus creates what we call a secondary world. We do not believe magic is real, so any magic in a novel makes it fantastic; a future setting is enough to violate what we know of the real world; a human being flying without technological assistance would be sufficient. Of course, there are problems with such simple definitions and distinctions. For example, some things in a fantastic work are expected to be “realistic”; a starship captain is expected to behave like a military commander—if he or she does not, we want to know why—and a human protagonist in a fantasy novel is usually expected to behave the way any of us might in the same situation and not contradict what we know or think we know about human nature.

Much depends on what author and reader believe to be real, of course. In a fantastic work, there is an assumption that both author and reader share a view of what is real, and have an unspoken agreement (that is, it is a convention of fantastic fiction) that what is being portrayed is not reality. Concepts of reality are not universally shared, and they change over time, so it is vital to take into account the cultural context of any text. For example, if a writer today were to wr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Terminology
• 2 The Early Period
• 3 The Pulp Era
• 4 The Atomic Age
• 5 The Flowering
• 6 The New Millennium
• Conclusion
• Works Cited—Secondary
• Index